Your business is an API away from untapped opportunity.

There are a lot of things that go in to producing a “best-in-class” API; how fine tuning the processes around your API's continuous integration and releases processes can enforce a minimum bar for quality, particularly with strict interfaces and versioning; how your core APIs should mostly reflect your business functions, and follow a common design; how thinking of your API as a separate product (which you might sell!) helps to consider the possibilities of what you might achieve and enable with it. The list of strong API design and implementation principles goes on extensively.

Small to medium sized business owners can often struggle to find the value in having an API which adheres to these strong principles. Business functions that cross boundaries of a company can be a great place to start to explore this value, discovering how a reliable API can automate or enhance more of that particular function to start with. Most of these businesses usually have an API powering an existing product/solution, but it has been tailor-made to suit that experience as opposed to the functions of the business. This can make moving to a more solution-agnostic design difficult, and usually means additional functions get bolted on to meet the needs of other solutions or integrations leaving you with an unmanageable mess over time.

Why you need a best in class API

For an API to be broadly utilised, its design should follow business functions

Often for growing companies, APIs are seen as just a necessary component of a product or solution. This usually means they are designed to meet the needs of a particular solution, with little regard for what other value might be attained by thinking of the API as a product in itself.

If your API looks like this and needs to serve multiple solutions, it is probably poorly designed. If your API were to instead reflect the functions of your business and not the requirements of a single consumer, then any consumer is able to tap into your business processes. This means that good API design is critical to both multi-channel success and horizontal scaling.

Designing an API around your business functions means that anyone who can use that API can create experiences tailored to their requirements, enabling a huge amount of flexibility and opportunity.

You can’t afford for API changes to break existing use cases

If you have an API that serves only one channel (such as your own internal platform) then the risk of change is not significant given its changes will align with the needs of that channel, and you’ll test the channel to make sure things still work.

When third parties depend on the same API, whether directly or indirectly, the risk introduced with changes can be significant, breaking the API for a single user can terminate an entire revenue stream, or damage a relationship if you’re working closely with a partner, as is the case with a lot of the examples above. If you break the API for them and it has a knock on effect to their service, you’re damaging their brand.

When you, your customers, partners, and staff, are able to depend on your API, anyone can tap into the business processes and introduce automations which can streamline your business, introduce new sales channels, or even sell your API as part of your solution. You may not charge for it, but if a customer or partner can integrate with you quicker or easier than with a competitor, or it reduces manual overhead for them, then your API is adding value.

There are a multitude of scenarios where an exhaustive API is an invaluable tool for any business, a few of which are detailed below.

Integrating your products or services with affiliates or partners

E-commerce business Big Shirts Ltd seamlessly incorporate products from partner brand UniqDesign

Big Shirts Ltd want to display third-party products on their platform, whilst upholding a frictionless customer journey. To do this, they use UniqDesign’s API to pull products into their system and display them seamlessly alongside their own products. They then use the API to synchronise order shipping states alongside cancellation and refund processes for orders of UniqDesign’s products, providing a clean and consistent experience to their customers.

Enginew sell refurbished car engines online and cross-sell consumables via an affiliate site G Tech

Enginew keep their business strictly engines, but recognise that their customers also need consumables like filters and oils. They don’t want to manage the logistics of these products, so they refer their customers to another supplier via their website and marketing campaigns. To do this, they leverage the API supplied by G Tech to push affiliate information whilst also pulling their affiliate sales data into their own platform’s reporting tool.

Enabling your customers to integrate your services into their workflows and applications

BuiltMachines orders machine parts from PartsCorp on demand

BuiltMachines have their own inventory management as part of their project management software. When their software warns about low stock in common parts or consumables they automatically order more stock from PartsCorp via their API.

National Kitchens books waste removal with WasteGo

When National Kitchens complete a kitchen fitting, they leave the waste/old kitchen out the front of the property ready for WasteGo to collect. Their job management app, which their fitters use automatically, lets WasteGo know of the new waste collection causing the whole process to be facilitated seamlessly by directly pushing the information to WasteGo via their API.

Deliver consistent experiences and feature parity across platforms and channels

FitRewards customers can track their workouts and points across multiple platforms

The API which serves the FitRewards mobile apps, website, and watch apps, gives them a consistent and reliable method of exposing data and functions to related technology applications. When users track their exercise on their smart watch, that information is immediately pushed to the API and then made available on the customer’s mobile apps.

PodPro listeners can seamlessly switch from their mobiles to smart speakers

When a PodPro podcaster listener stops listening on a device, their progress is relayed to the PodPro API. The user can then listen from a different device without disruption as both applications communicate with the same API.

Giving internal staff freedom to automate with low code tools

Jen from customer success at MealPrep Co notifies a small cohort of niche customers whenever there are new vegan options available

MealPrep Co’s API provides a simple mechanism for retrieving new products, so when Jen noticed lots of customers were asking for more vegan options she wanted to make sure they were the first to know when they came in. As the API is well documented and includes an Open API specification, Jen was able to import this into her low code automation tool easily and set up a highly specific workflow herself. Jen wants to create more automations like this for other niche audiences.

Dylan from Kart World suspends vehicles from use automatically for maintenance

Kart World has a vehicle management solution that tracks and records when vehicles are used and automatically assigns them to drivers. Dylan wanted a quick and easy way to automatically suspend a vehicle in the system if it hadn’t been serviced in 5 days or 300 laps, whichever came first. He was able to hook the API for the solution into a low code platform to do this automatically and instruct it to email him when a vehicle was automatically suspended, improving the safety of the track and making his job easier.

How Eject helps anyone deliver enterprise grade APIs

Creating and maintaining APIs which are resilient enough to be consumed for multiple use cases can be challenging. It is often the case that organisations or teams choose to introduce new APIs alongside their existing ones, tailored again for a specific consumer. This quickly becomes impossible to manage and thus you arrive back at the same problem where the risk of change is uncertain and maintaining all of these interfaces is tedious.

Eject’s low-code API builder provides you with a straightforward platform for not only designing APIs, but also building and deploying them. Eject warns you prior to a release if changes are likely to break an existing use-case and encourages versioning for backwards compatibility. Out of the box, it provides enterprise grade logging, monitoring, testing, documentation, and deployments. Quite simply, it gives you all the tools and guidance you need to build robust APIs which add real value to your business; whether that be through improving the experience of internal, external, or third party engineering teams, enabling you to streamline operations, or introduce new revenue streams.

Eject is built on the principle that solutions built with us, belong to you. At any point you can take your code and run it anywhere - all of the underlying technology is open sourced with MIT licenses. We believe this makes Eject the perfect tool for ambitious businesses looking to grow and scale quickly.

How do I get access to Eject?

Eject’s early functionality is being made exclusively available to our engineering partners: select companies building SaaS products. If you want to talk to us about potential partnerships you can contact us via our contact page on our website https://eject.tech/contact/ .

Alternatively, sign up to our waitlist via the sign-up box below.

At Eject, we believe APIs are going to be the backbone of technology solutions for decades to come, and with Eject the future of APIs looks bright.