How APIs and Some Internet Services can Boost Your Online Business!
Learn in this article how to use APIs to improve your website or your small startup! Don’t send emails, don’t store them in an excel file. Do not create user forms. You don’t need to do all of that. You can integrate all of that without coding. Just using services from some companies on the internet, which are totally for free. Let’s start it!
Say that you designed a web page and you even created it. At some point you need to vive some value to the user. You need to give him content, get his email and provide him with the promised value etc. Here is where you can take advantage of the services that are out there! Integrate user forms, chats, payment systems etc. A world of possibilities. Tools that are for free and they help us to automate tasks. They help us to interact with the customers. They do stuff for us.
Let’s begin with an example to try to understand how you use such services and after that I will explain what is going on behind the scenes. How they work and why they work.
Let’s get it started!
Say you have your web page, with Wordpress, or you did by yourself (hopefully). In this webpage you have a big picture explaining your product, some other pictures explaining the features of your product and maybe some nice powerful videos. You ned to have a field, a user form, where the user can leave you his email right? Remember? We need to activate him. How would you do it by yourself? First you have to create the design of the form, then you have to code it with HTML. You also have to create the data base in your web application in order to store all the user emails. After that, you have to create the connections with the database. Seems tedious right?
Do not reinvent the wheel!
There is an alternative, that is way easier. Companies offer services, where you just design with the mouse your user form, for example, and they give you the HTML code and everything needed by the form to be operative online. You copy the code that this platform gives you, you paste this code in your web page and you are email form is working. That’s it
Since the goal from this article is to give you the big picture of how to launch your product, I present you the tools, to let you know that you can use them and it’s on you to learn them.
Here is a nice explanatory video to see how it works though:
Just as a summary, with Wufoo you design your form, just using the mouse and they give you a code to embed it in your web page. That’s it
The best is, there are more services like this. You can embed in your website a payment system, you can embed a newsletter form, you can embed a chat, etc. It always works the same way. You use a service to design what you want and they give you the code to paste it in your webpage. Period!
But how do these services work? How can it be possible that I send information from my browser, to them, and everything is stored and it’s accesable for ever? Magic? No! let’s try to understand how these services and the internet work.
The key concept are the APIs: Application Programming Interface.
Wow, what was that? Very shortly, APIs are a system used by computers, webs, programs to communicate with each other on the Internet. They send information that way, with APIs. Instead of communicating like we do, with webpages, nice pictures, nice videos, they just use plain text. They send information in a special way that we will now see.
To truly understand the concept of an API, let’s try to understand how the Internet works:
First of all, we are the client and we are using a browser to visit webpages. We are in our computer / laptop / phone. When you are in Google Chrome, Fire Fox, Internet Explorer, you tip a URL (the direction of a website) and you press enter. For example, you tip www.lewagon.com/berlin, you press enter and you end up in the desired web page.
What happened exactly as we pressed Enter? We sent an HTTP request with the URL that we want to visit (the address). We sent a request that point to this webpage, which is hosted in a SERVER. These servers are located somewhere in the world. Ireland, USA, wherever. These servers host the webpages and with the webpages addresses we call them. Once the servers receives the request from our side, they send us back the content of the webpage that we are asking for.
HTML Response
The key is how this service / server sends us back the response / the web page. They send us a bunch of files, for example, HTML files, CSS files, JS file. When I say us, I mean, server sends these files to the browser where we are. This browser, with this files, is able to build the webpage that we are requesting. Why? If you know a little bit of HTML and CSS, now the browser has the HTML file, that means, our browser has the structure of the page. The browser has also the CSS file, that means, the browser has all the design of the page. And the browser of course receives all the pictures that need to be displayed. With this information, our browser (Google Chrome, Internet Explorer, whatever) is able to build the web page that we see with our eyes.
At the end, we see the web page with colors, pictures, cool forms. Why do we see that? Because we are humans. We like to see things to understand them. But how about computers? Do they need this beauty? You remember that we are trying to understand the concept of APIs right? Let’s go for it!
When computers are communicating, when these services are communicating (Wufoo, Servers etc.), they don’t need these nice webpages. They just need straightforward information. They communicate with text files with a specific format. Here is an example and you will understand it better.
Look at these images in a web page. We see with our eyes the list of the most rich people.
All these information was sent by the server in the response. We ask for this web page with our HTTP request and we got this information back. With the HTML file, with the CSS, with the pictures. The browser built the web page for us.
APIs, however, they don’t work like this. They just need structured text to send information from one web to another. Here is an example:
{
“richestPeople”: [
{“firstName”:”Bill”, “lastName”:”Gates”, “value”:”81"},
{“firstName”:”Carlos”, “lastName”:”Slim”, “value”:”79"},
{“firstName”:”Warren”, “lastName”:”Buffet”, “value”:”72"}
]
}
See? We can still find the same information, the richest people in the world, but just in a text-structured way.
See?That is structured data. We still find the same information. The richest ones. The server does not give us back a nice web page, nice HTML, CSS files to build a beautiful web page. The server sends us back this piece of structured data. So APIs / Services do not need anything else rather than good structured data.
Now think about our example with the email and the user form from the Wufoo service. That is exactly what we are doing, what is going on behind the scenes. We insert a user form in our page and we are communicating with the Wufoo service thanks to his API.
I know these concepts can be quite tricky. If you understood them, awesome! If not, I recommend to keep digging in this API world. Just take your time, read about it. But don’t worry about it, you don’t need to understand the theory in order to use APIs. As you have seen, you just need to copy paste code.
Connect APIs to automate tasks
Now that we know how an API works and now that we know how to use these API / Services, it’s time to get the most out of it. It’s time to give you the premium content that I promised at the beginning of the article! It’s time to connect different APIs, different services, so that we automate things. So that we don’t spend time in boring tasks like sending emails, looking for information etc. Let APIs work for us!
In order to have all your emails, social media, newsletter, interaction with the user etc. all together, there is a super tool which connects all the services that you use. It’s called Zapier (if you see the word API inside, you are a master ;-) ).
How this Zapier application works is through Zaps. Zaps are just actions that we want to do. With an example you will understand it way easier.
Say that we receive 200 emails in our Wuffo services. In our dashboard in Wuffo we have all the emails. Say that we want to have these emails in our gmail account, more precisely, in a Google Drive Sheet that we have. Because later we want to analyze the email, whatever we want do in the sheet.
We can use Zapier to connect these two services. We tell Zapier, hej, whenever we have a new email in Wufoo, please send it to a certain Google Sheet that I have. That’s it. No coding involve, no difficulty. It’s always the same, you use a trigger to provoke an action. The trigger in this case is: “whenever I have a new email in Wufoo”. The action is: “add this email in a Google Sheet”. This works because Zapier has all these triggers and all these actions, so you just need to tell him what you want to do, you just need to select them.
See this video for a more precise information!
To finish with these APIs / Services, I really want to give you value with these article. That’s why I am going to present some tools, that you can embed to your webpage for free and of course, you can connect later on with Zapier. These tools can help you also to be more efficient in your business, in your daily work.
Trello
This is a platform where you can create cards, lists, To Do lists etc. It’s a great tool to organize yourself, to organize your team etc. Have a look at it. You can, for example, have three cards: received emails, contacted persons, positive responses. That way, you can move people among the three cards and have an overview of your leads. Remember the email user form from Wufoo? Remember Zapier? You can send the emails that you collect in Wufoo to this Trello App, with no effort. Everything automated!
Mail Chimp
This tool is great to create newsletter and campaigns. You can create custom templates and send it to all your emails that you have in lists. Zapier? yes! you can bring to this app all the emails from Wufoo or Trello and then create the campaigns with this Mail Chimp App.
https://mailchimp.com/features/landing-pages/
Stripe
With Stripe you can put in your web site a payment system. You use the service and you will have one button where the user clicks and sends the money. Stripe takes care of the security, of the transaction etc. You just need to visit their web page and learn how to integrate their API into your website.
Slack. Where Works Happens
As Steve Jobs said, now we are going to connect the dots! Slack is the last platform that I will introduce you and there is a reason for that. Slack is a platform where you can put all your work as a small company. It has a chat, you can send files, you can make calls, you can ping people, you can create channels of information etc. It’s an extremely efficient way to centralize your workflow.
Here you have how it works:
I strongly recommend you to bring all the services that you are using (Wufoo, Payment Systems etc.) into Slack, using Zapier. If you receive an email, send a message in Slack in the appropriate channel: “hey guys, we have this new email”. If someone mentions your company in a Tweet, send this information to Slack (yes, you can do that with Zapier). That way, your team, you, have a control of all that’s going on in just one platform.
We have come to the end of this article. Awesome that you read so far. Hopefully it was useful for you. It’s time to do a summary of all the information that I presented.
Take aways
- Invest in your product pitch. Target, pain & Solution model.
- Acquire clients and activate them, while tracking all the metrics to be more efficient
- Pick right services for prototyping your idea.
- Use services out there to create user forms, emails, newsletter, chats, payment systems etc. Use their APIs
- Automate tasks with Zapier. Connect all the APIs
- Use Slack to centralize your company information.
- Engage your customers with you!
Scale
Some last words, in case you are extremely successful, something that I don’t doubt that it is going to happen if you’ve come so far in this article :).
If you need to scale your company, if you are getting a lot of users, a lot of volume, you need to give some structure to your company, to your web application. You can not rely any longerin these small services. They are great to begin with, but at some point, you need to have control of everything, you need to own the information. These services are for free at the beginning, but they can get very expensive if you have a lot of traffic. At some point you need to create your whole web application. To do that, you have two options. Whether you hire a CTO (Chief Technical Officer) or you build the web page, the platform yourself.
In case you are willing to learn web development, how to build web applications, I can share with you my experience, on how I manage to become a freelancer building web applications. I first studied HTML, JavaScript and PHP by myself, but at some point it was overwhelming, I couldn’t find the path to get everything done. That’s why I registered to the coding boot camp of Le Wagon. I learnt in 2 months the big picture, everything that I needed to create web applications, to understand startups, to build my own one. I learnt to code. Nowadays I am working as a freelancer helping customers to automate processes, helping them to have online presence. And once I learnt the basis of coding at Le Wagon, I kept learning and learning by myself. They give me the push. Hopefully you find your way to learn what you want to learn, what you need. That was my way.
Whatever your idea is, don’t let it die. Push it to the market and see what happens. At least you will learn a lot.
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If you missed part I of this article, here it is:
