Managing API Adoption in a Complex, Full Value Chain IoT Market
How does an API-as-a-product provider manage developer relations when the whole value chain needs to be educated about how to gain value from your product?
This is going to be a question more and more startups will be asking as they create new products and services that are ahead of the market. One solution is to pivot to where product-market fit need is demonstrated, as Evercam had to do when they realised their camera-over-API solution was solving problems the market hadn’t yet had. But in other cases, the market has shown there are problems that need solving, it is just that the tech to do so is a step beyond how current solutions usually get implemented.
This is the challenge facing messaging platform SmartNotify. At the core of their offering is a way to collect details of each individual end user’s contact information so that business can determine which channel is best for communicating with them. Unlike other push notification systems, SmartNotify sees the intelligence and contextual approach as being about knowing who not to contact. So their service turns the usual customer broadcast messaging on its head. This is taking business some time to understand and leverage the key difference SmartNotify offers in the market.
SmartNotify is working across a range of key markets, including transport, utilities, smart cities, housing, healthcare and safety. CEO and founder, Gregory Menvielle talked about three markets where he sees challenges in successfully building developer communities and how he is solving them.
Enterprises
Large enterprises like Parisian rail service SNCF and large utilities and power companies use SmartNotify to alert their customers of service outages and changes. “The great part with enterprise is that they are more security and data privacy conscious,” says Menvielle. This has meant the SmartNotify product has had to up the ante on its capacity in these areas, but Menvielle says the pay off is that they have more quickly moved passed the MVP stage as working with enterprise has helped them focus on being more efficient and robust.
By working with large enterprises, Menvielle has also been able to better understand the social acceptance of push notifications and where end users draw the line. He is now taking this learning to retail. He says the market has been thinking about using indoor beacons for things like pushing coupons to shoppers already located in a store. But Menvielle says this model needs to change. “What works much better with retail is retargeting, following up a week later. We want to be able to capture a shopper’s mood, use data points to tell if a person is more likely to buy or is happy with the shopping experience and then reach out to them. Business is open to that but we are still looking at how we bring in the privacy and security learnings from enterprise to make that work,” says Menvielle.
Smart cities
In the smart cities space, SmartNotify is working with city developers to be able to assess environmental threat and response capabilities using their partnership with mapping service ESRI. In France, following a severe heatwave in 2003 in which close to 15,000 people died, it is now mandated that cities must inform high risk populations (such as the elderly) of heatwave and other severe weather impacts. SmartNotify’s product has that capability, but they are finding that their biggest problem is in helping the city developers to implement the product by connecting with end users.
“The technology is all there. We can onboard developers. But we need to help those developers onboard the end users. We can automatically put environment threats on our maps and use that as a display and to start to automate where to do the broadcast out. But what the devs need is support to do the inbound monitoring of the conversation to map that back in,” Menvielle explains.
He continues:
“What we are finding is that in cities, there are a lot of people who don’t have access to the latest apps, but they are the ones most at risk, most in need of information. How do you make the elderly talk back to the city? You have to be able to mix different channels.”
Home automation startups
SmartNotify’s latest product development has been to take their enterprise offering and to create an Amazon Alexa API that can work for any smart home automation provider. “We have customers in the US where home automation is a big market,” says Menvielle. “For most companies, the communication layer is about being able to push communications to the home, so Alexa is growing a lot of interest.”
Menvielle says one of the key enablers in entering this market has been to be able to have an OpenAPI specification which has been able to spin up documentation, create a sandbox and generate multiple code examples automatically.
Lessons
For next generation API-as-a-product providers who need to better explain their service to the market, SmartNotify’s experiences suggest three key lessons:
- Key messaging may need to be adapted for each key segment: SmartNotify learnt quickly that they needed to talk in terms of security and privacy when selling to enterprise, whereas enabling customer communications across a range of channels was more of a conversation with smaller businesses.
- Even though your API is aimed at developers, you may need to help them as your customers get to their end user: Working with cities, SmartNotify needed to be able to help their developer customers reach their end users in order for their service to provide the utility it was created to offer.
- Leverage API specification formats to build out developer portal supports: SmartNotify has more quickly been able to enter the voice recognition and home automation market in the US by spinning up developer resources automatically from their OpenAPI specification metadata.
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