Developer Success: the real challenge for APIs, and how we plan to solve that

Inés Luna
Hitch HQ
Published in
4 min readFeb 28, 2017

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Designing and implementing an API is just the beginning of a very long journey, whose success will be marked by how well you establish meaningful relationships with your customers. But most importantly, how good you’re at keeping this connection.

Nowadays most SAAS products understand that Customer Success is a key piece in this journey, yet in the world of APIs as products we’re still scrambling to understand how to engage and support developer communities. There are no standards nor proven best practices, or established metrics to measure this (however recently we gave this a crack).

This is an especially relevant challenge for new APIs, where resources might be limited. The question is: how can you start engaging and supporting a growing API community in a scalable and cost-effective way?

We call this Developer Success. Going beyond developer experience and actually supporting the developer through the process of working with an API until gaining success. We believe this is an important iteration on Developer Experience, to incorporate the evolution of Customer Success practice area in recents years.

I’d like to suggest some ways of translating what I know about Customer Success into the space of APIs, developer communities and Developer Success.

API Customer Success: not a team but a journey

As I pointed out in my most recent post, customer success should be a cross-functional effort which aims to identify the different stages of the customer journey, and engage customers at the right time. So should developer success: the underlying goal is ensuring users are getting maximum value out of your API throughout their journey.

The way I see it, first-class API support involves different resources, based on the stage the user is at:

Discovery — Developers and product managers can spend hours trying to find the perfect solution for their business problem. You need to make it incredibly easy for them to understand what your API does, and help them choose you over other APIs.

Onboarding — Everything you need to do to help developers start integrating right away. This basically means detailed and easy to use documentation, including hello world instructions and other getting started resources.

Growth— Once successfully onboarded, you need to help customers get the maximum out of your product and keep them engaged. Send notifications every time your API changes, share best practices and case studies, and carefully communicate new or deprecated features. Your customers will trust you if you do a good job at communicating these things.

A separate chapter is getting feedback from the community, which is a common practice in Customer Success. Pick a bunch of users who are active, and spend 20 minutes with them to learn about the things they love, and the things they don’t love. These discovery calls will be an enormous source of feedback that ideally should reflect on your product roadmap. They also have a very positive impact on your users’ perception of your product and your brand.

Throughout these phases, it is important that developers can get support from you in whatever form they prefer. Basically, you need to cover two scenarios:

Self-service support resources — Give both newcomers and advanced users resources to solve their problems. If you get a question over and over again, it means your docs need to be improved. Build this link between the different teams involved in managing your support tickets, and updating your documentation.

Support channel — Provide a clear support channel for more complex questions and requests, and share your SLAs.

How we understand Developer Success support at Hitch

In the last few months we’ve talked with hundreds of API providers. Some mature players in the API space, but also companies getting started. This allowed us to identify two important areas linked to Developer Success: companies are basically trying to grow their API community, or trying to improve how they onboard and support it. Or both!

Our offering is very simple: with just a basic API profile on Hitch (which can also be used as a developer portal) you can already start gaining visibility for your API and engage the community through our changelog notifications.

Our Starter and Pro plans include more advanced tools to help you better support your users, or invest in community growth, depending on what you need. Targeted announcements, a support chatbot, analytics and integrations with Zendesk and Salesforce.

We know this is an ambitious endeavour, especially in such a diverse and changing market. Our is to make it very easy to developer communities engage with API providers so they can build amazing products.

Are you in this journey? We’d love to discuss how we can help you get to the next level. You can also check out our pricing page, or sign up for a Hitch account which is totally free.

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Ready to start engaging and growing your API community with Hitch? Sign up now.

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Communicator. Dancer. Music lover. Customer Success at @HitchHQ