How to Increase Adoption of your API
So you have built and deployed an excellent API. The next step is clear; reach the right developers and accelerate the adoption of your API. But how? Start by thinking like a developer who is looking for your API.
Here are a few pointers to consider.
Market your API
You need a medium where you can connect with the developers who are looking for a solution your API provides. Marketing the API yourself can be a hassle. What you need is an API Hub where thousands of developers are on the prowl for suitable APIs to use.
RapidAPI Hub is the world's largest API hub, with over 3 million developers accessing more than 30,000 APIs. Besides reaching so many developers, RapidAPI makes API management easy. It takes care of the nuts and bolts of billing so you can focus on building APIs.
Solve a Problem
More often than not, the real challenge is not building an API. It is more about finding a problem your API can solve.
Think about it from your consumer’s perspective and decide your API’s Unique Selling Proposition (USP); you will need it in the next part.
Documentation
Documentation is the first view of your API. Developers need to understand what a product has to offer before they adopt it.
APIs can be confusing if they lack proper, explanatory documentation. Make sure the documentation clearly propagates the USP of your API and the problem it solves. Showing use cases and example responses can help a lot as well.
Interactive API Preview
While browsing your API, developers may want to know whether it fits their requirements or exactly what kind of data it returns. They will want to dive deeper by testing the API endpoints. If you make this process convenient, you can increase adoption.
This is another area where RapidAPI Hub comes handy. Using its interactive preview, developers can test the API endpoints directly from their browser and see what the responses look like.
Performance
Finally, the most crucial benchmark before a developer adopts your API is its performance. The response time of the first call to the API is the decisive factor in adoption. The journey of adoption, starting from discovering your API comes down to this point. Therefore it is always worth focusing on optimizing the performance of the API.
If you are interested, consider going through these ways to optimize your API performance.