Tips and Tricks for Building a Great Developer Platform
As a serial entrepreneur, strategic adviser, former Head of Product @ Uber Developer Platform, Co-founder of Echo (grew dev platform from zero to 85 Billion API calls a month), co-author of APML, and co-founder of the DataPortability Project I’ve spent my career building products that developers love.
What is a Developer Platform?
In case you don’t already know, Developer Platforms (sometimes referred to as APIs and SDKs — but there’s much more to them that this) allow you to open up your product to a marketplace of 3rd party developers and companies. This allows them to invest in your success by a) integrating you services into other tools b) dreaming up creative ways to build on top of what you’ve built c) driving more transactions and revenue into your core business.
In this way, Developer Platforms help you create defensibly for your business and elevate your product from a point solution to a critical part of the fabric of the Internet. It’s arguably the key reason while companies and products like Facebook and the iPhone became as powerful as they did.
Learn from my mistakes
Over the years I’ve publish a number of Tips and Tricks for building great platforms that developers love. I’ve summarized and linked them below for easy reference.
Short Form Audio Podcasts
Here they are in Audio form. A deck version can be found at the bottom of this post as well!
Slide Show Presentation
Here they are in deck form. I’d love to know what you’ve learned building or using Developer Platforms — please feel free to share them in the comments below.
Let’s talk details
Of course, implementing each of these the things outlined in the presentation can be tricky depending on your exact strategic goals and market. Feel free to drop me a line via the StartupSuperSquad contact form to discuss your specific needs.
