There are many success factors or attributes that make a product successful. If the product itself is not good, it will make its way out of the market invariably. However, many good products find it difficult to succeed in the market. What causes this? Here are few parameters we think are very important for success of API products or Platforms.
Value of attraction (How well it attracts its participants)
The product should be able to attract lots of users and developers. If you look at some the successful products or platforms, it would become more apparent that they are backed by multiple number of users, developers, communities and product fans. Success of a platform or product is directly proportional to the number of users/developers using it. To make your API product or platform successful, you need to attract lot of participants and quickly convert them into users.
Quick learning (How easily they learn it to meet their goals)
To convert a visitor into a user of an API product, it is to be best ensured that the user should be able understand the API with the greatest of ease and instance.
To convert a visitor into a user of your API product, you got to make sure that s/he learns your API easily and able to use it in their application without spending much time. User adoption will increase drastically if we are successful in providing all the tools and information such as interactive API documentation, sample code, client library, reference application etc. that would make the learning process easier and faster and also provide all types support to help them implement/integrate it with their solution quickly.
Co-creation of value (How well it fosters the exchange and co-creation of value)
Successful platforms/products are always supported by large and active community. A community emerges with a knowledge-base which helps new users to scale well; provide support for many new and existing users and reduce the dependencies on the product development team as a whole. It would also provide an environment to contribute/share knowledge, which will create a lot of value for products and communities.
