How APIs are Eating the Product Stack
This post is part of our series covering the API and SaaS world. You can find all our stories on the P9 Medium Channel.
Product Stack = All the technology blocks used to build a product
Schematically we can divide the product stack in two main layers, Infrastructure and Features, which are composed of many different blocks depending on your particular product.
- Infrastructure layer: all the technology blocks that are used to create the foundation of your product like hosting, communication (emails, voice…), monitoring and analytics, payment, security etc.
- Feature layer: all the blocks that are used to build the features with which the users interact.
Below is the diagram of an hypothetical product which offers to its users a search, a referral system, photo sharing, an activity dashboard, in-app messaging, a booking system with other members and a map to locate them, some social elements like a feed etc. (basically all the blocks of the feature layer below).
Of course this product needs the proper infrastructure to run with hosting, monitoring and more.
If we wanted to build this product 15 years ago we basically needed to code in-house every component listed above, both at the infrastructure and feature levels. This is why it was not uncommon for a company to have its own physical servers (no Amazon Web services at that time, sorry).
Then in the second half of the past decade (2005–2010) several important players emerged in the infrastructure layer offering developers more options to build this product:
We still needed to code ourselves the majority of the components (especially inthe feature layer) but the situation started to evolve.
From from that point an explosion of APIs happened in both direction:
- Horizontally with more and more infrastructure components getting API-fied (ex: Stripe founded in 2011)
- Vertically with more and more APIs “unbundling” traditional product features (or Features-as-a-Service” as Stefan Bielau coined it in a VentureBeat article) and going up the stack.
Going back to our hypothetical product, if we want to build it today we could potentially use all these APIs out of the box (this is only a selection, not an exhaustive list):
Basically APIs are eating the whole product stack (yep there’s even an API to integrate emojis and stickers easily in your app).
Why? The main reason is that the tech industry is maturing at many levels and this explosion is a consequence of this maturation:
- Market maturity: there are more and more products being built (just look at the daily feed of new products on PH) so the market of customers needing “Feature as a service” and infrastructure APIs is growing. Good time to be a pick and shovel seller.
- Tech maturity: more and better infrastructure APIs = easier to build “Feature-as-a-Service” products too.
Both factors contribute to this explosion and I bet that this trend is probably not going to stop tomorrow.
I’ve created a mindmap listing several of these “Feature Layer” APIs, please ping me on Twitter if you want to add your startup here:
