Building Your API Partner Program
Perspective on use of the API to power partnerships & business development activities
We place a heavy emphasis on the API partner program as part of the foundation and believe it should be central to the business model planning from the beginning. In our opinion, it should be part of the early strategic development plan for all SaaS companies. In fact, for many companies, an API program can serve as a go-to-market strategy prior to or instead of development of a destination site, drastically reducing development and marketing costs.
Offering access to your web services through a tiered API can improve the friction laden business development process that requires a heavy traditional outbound sales approach for success. Rather than changing your partner revenue model, the goal is to widen & lower the barrier to entry to work with your solution.
Building Partners through a tiered API
The first tier would be limited-use, perhaps non-commercial for developers only with limits on function/result set. This tier 1 freely-available API will foster developer interest & allow them to work with your solution to create innovative uses that perhaps your team has not yet thought of or do not have the resources to cover. This engaged group of early adopters becomes your initial target for the business dev team - inbound marketing at very little cost.
Higher tiers or premium uses can be monetized via metered use, flat monthly fees, per call or some combination. This can ultimately model your current revenue model of the partner program - just with lower friction in the partner development process.
Lastly, if applicable, integrate a write component to the API and allow the network effect of your API partners to aggregate an ever growing set of inbound (and of-course curated) data - allowing all partners to benefit from each other. BazaarVoice is tremendous use case example of this in action with their aggregated product reviews solution.