Startup Jenga: How third party services are threatening your business 🔥
Recently a client asked us to add an Instagram feed to his new website. A short Google search brought me to the Instagram API documentation. It mentioned the following:
Deprecated? This made me wonder if it was even worth setting up. I of course followed the link and went down the rabbit hole. Instagram decided to deprecate their current API and create a new one; called Instagram Graph API. This new API focuses on Instagram business profiles instead of user profiles. After carefully reading which endpoints will be deprecated and when, it turned out that accessing basic user info will be deprecated early 2020. So there’s still quite some time left! But it seems Instagram is not accepting new apps anymore so unfortunately that’s too bad for us.
Single point of failure
But the interesting part was not the deprecation of the Instagram API, it was the discussion that followed. Among the comments there was a developer who built Instagram dependent projects for his clients and is in trouble.
Are you guys really deprecating the Public Content function?!? I mean, we’ve got clients who spent lots of time and money developping an application that uses that. Are you telling me they wasted their time and money?
Besides the discussion going in the comment section of the deprecation announcement TechCrunch also published an article discussing the Instagram API — as well as Facebook’s API — which is currently putting a hold on new app admissions.
Apparently last weekend(30/03/18) Instagram decided to limit API calls from 5000 per hour to 200 per hour . Which likely means a lot of developers already received angry phone calls from their bosses/clients throughout their weekend. But this is only the tip of the iceberg; seeing within a few months the API will start the first fase of deprecating altogether.
TechCrunch also mentions the app Reports+ which relies solely on data from Instagram. The app gives users analytics about their Instagram audience. At the cost of 3,99$ per user per month — they already grossed $18 million since their product release in 2016.
With these changes pushed by Instagram at least one million dollar company is going under. This brings me to the concept of the single point of failure:
“A single point of failure (SPOF) is a part of a system that, if it fails, will stop the entire system from working.”
And that is exactly what will happen when your application solely relies on an external service. If that service, for some reason stops to exist your whole application and in some cases business falls to pieces.
The problem is that in general you can’t believe that they will ever go out of business or deprecate a service that so many people built on top of. The truth is that bad things can and will happen if you want it or not. It’s Murphy’s Law all over again:
“Anything that can go wrong will go wrong”
Keeping in mind elements of your product or service that are dependent and thinking about a backup will save you a lot of trouble in the future.
Be resilient
Businesses in general should be resilient. There is always a possibility that the great idea you started your business on five years ago is not going to be relevant anymore. Clinging on will help you destroy your business. Sometimes you have to kill your darlings.
Prepare yourself and assess all your third-party services to be ahead of these issues.
- Create a list of all the services your web application/mobile application / business uses.
- Give them a rating from trivial up to life-changing.
(trivial, non-lethal, worthwhile, weighty, life-changing) - Single out the ones which would severely impact your business in case they would renounce their service.
- Think of alternatives.
If your application solely relies on login with Facebook, think of other login strategies. Use Google for instance — or implement a classic email login.
It’s not only in business that we rely on third party service providers. Throughout our daily lives we rely on the services by Netflix, Spotify, Whatsapp. If Netflix would go bankrupt, where else would we get our daily dose of Black Mirror episodes? Be ready and have alternatives, just in case.
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