Companies like Stripe and Twilio have built their entire businesses around providing a better platform for developers to build B2B apps and integration off of. By providing their service as an API for developers to use, they allow for many different new products and use cases to pop up that wouldn't otherwise be built, which in-turn they receive increased revenue from when they succeed. A true win-win model for growth.
If you look at Facebook' s acquisition of Oculus, in Mark Zuckerberg's blog , he clearly points how the $2bn acquisition benefits Facebook's developer community; including building next generation games as well as Facebook being the center of all new & upcoming gaming apps & startups; albeit, they are aware of Whatsapp in its infancy.
Having a vibrant developer ecosystem is an essential condition to success in the new Cloud era. There are couple of reasons why companies would want to have one
1) Introduce new products and use cases like the Facebook and Stripe examples. Once a developer creates an app they plug into these systems - Facebook(user ads) or Stripe(payment rails) and eventually these platforms benefit from increased users or increased payments through their systems
2) Interoperability with other apps - Customers are looking to use best in class apps and they want these best in class apps to seamlessly talk to each other. If your product does not connect with other apps, you run the risk that the customer is unhappy and not sticky and will likely switch once somebody else makes products which do. Clearly, any company does not have enough internal resources to do these integrations themselves; so if one wants to focus on their products and let the developers create these integrations it's a win-win for everyone. More ever, now that your product is visible in other apps (through integrations), the other apps become a source of new user additions. here your cost of customer acquisition is almost zero (no marketing, no development), no CFO would shy away from such growth.
So the next obvious question is how can a company go about building a vibrant developer ecosystem - the simple answer is be in the developer's shoes and think what is important for them - develop apps easily and cost effectively (lower cost) and help market apps (higher revenue). Some companies that have done an excellent job in both of these areas are Salesforce & Box.
1) Lower cost - Being an app developer requires one to have business logic, programming language knowledge, hosting, back end, billing, customer support skills. A lot to ask from a couple people small app developer company, at times a single app developer. Successful platforms that have been successful in this area are ones that have enabled their programmers to be the business idea guy, while they take care of the rest.
2) Higher Revenue - Access to users as well as the ability to get to these users is paramount. This means, conducting educational seminars to create awareness about the app, promoting developers amongst the user base to help in discovery of the app, social marketing kit etc are all essential elements of this strategy.
Developer platforms are examples of two sided networks, once you get the fly wheel going one could see exponential benefits, most prominently in customer stickiness & growth channels. But as folks know, developer platforms are tricky as well - how should your pricing strategy be, who do you charge and at what point, the classic egg and chicken situation but worth the effort.
If you look at Facebook' s acquisition of Oculus, in Mark Zuckerberg's blog , he clearly points how the $2bn acquisition benefits Facebook's developer community; including building next generation games as well as Facebook being the center of all new & upcoming gaming apps & startups; albeit, they are aware of Whatsapp in its infancy.
Having a vibrant developer ecosystem is an essential condition to success in the new Cloud era. There are couple of reasons why companies would want to have one
1) Introduce new products and use cases like the Facebook and Stripe examples. Once a developer creates an app they plug into these systems - Facebook(user ads) or Stripe(payment rails) and eventually these platforms benefit from increased users or increased payments through their systems
2) Interoperability with other apps - Customers are looking to use best in class apps and they want these best in class apps to seamlessly talk to each other. If your product does not connect with other apps, you run the risk that the customer is unhappy and not sticky and will likely switch once somebody else makes products which do. Clearly, any company does not have enough internal resources to do these integrations themselves; so if one wants to focus on their products and let the developers create these integrations it's a win-win for everyone. More ever, now that your product is visible in other apps (through integrations), the other apps become a source of new user additions. here your cost of customer acquisition is almost zero (no marketing, no development), no CFO would shy away from such growth.
So the next obvious question is how can a company go about building a vibrant developer ecosystem - the simple answer is be in the developer's shoes and think what is important for them - develop apps easily and cost effectively (lower cost) and help market apps (higher revenue). Some companies that have done an excellent job in both of these areas are Salesforce & Box.
1) Lower cost - Being an app developer requires one to have business logic, programming language knowledge, hosting, back end, billing, customer support skills. A lot to ask from a couple people small app developer company, at times a single app developer. Successful platforms that have been successful in this area are ones that have enabled their programmers to be the business idea guy, while they take care of the rest.
2) Higher Revenue - Access to users as well as the ability to get to these users is paramount. This means, conducting educational seminars to create awareness about the app, promoting developers amongst the user base to help in discovery of the app, social marketing kit etc are all essential elements of this strategy.
Developer platforms are examples of two sided networks, once you get the fly wheel going one could see exponential benefits, most prominently in customer stickiness & growth channels. But as folks know, developer platforms are tricky as well - how should your pricing strategy be, who do you charge and at what point, the classic egg and chicken situation but worth the effort.
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