Business of APIs: From Integration to Monetisation, Anton Shchekalov, VP Engineering, Wavecell

1. 1
Business of APIs:
From Integration to Monetization
Anton Shchekalov
VP Engineering
Singapore
23 April 2019

2. Hello! My name is…
• From St. Petersburg, Russia
• Building APIs in telecom sector for 15 years
• VP Engineering at Wavecell for last 3 years
atrony
Anton Shchekalov

3. 3
According to API Directories (ProgrammableWeb, RapidAPI, etc)
10 000 – 22 000 APIs
Public APIs

4. 4
Financial APIs
Source: ProgrammableWeb, Aug 2017

5. 5
API Driving businesses
> 50%
> 90%
> 70%
100%

6. 6
Business models
APIs
Free
Developer
Pays
Developer
Gets Paid
Indirect
* For more: see “20 Business models by John Musser”

7. 7
Growth of Wavecell API
90% of company revenue comes by API
18x growth of API requests in last 3 years
APIRequests

8. 8
Wavecell’s Products
Enhance customer experience through real-time
communication across various digital channels
SMS API & Campaign
Manager to send messages
to end customers around the
world
SMS
Programmatically send
richer messages and
content to users of major
Chat Apps such as
WhatsApp Business,
WeChat, Viber and others
Chat Apps
Generate interactive text-
to-speech (TTS) phone
calls and give customer
applications a voice
Voice
Redefine customer
experience by integrating
video interaction into
business apps and
websites
Video Interaction

9. 9
20192010 2016 2017 2018
REGIONAL EXPANSIONS
Expanded presence in Thailand,
Indonesia, Hong Kong and the Philippines
SERIES B FUNDING USD 8.15 MILLION
Funded by Qualgro, MDI Ventures
and Wavemaker Partners
NEW PRODUCT ADDITIONS
Chat Apps and Voice solutions were
added into our product offering
Where we first started
Wavecell was founded in 2010
and was self-funded
Our journey
Powerful CPaaS platform
Smart front-ends, optimise
connectivity channels

10. 10
Bringing values to various industries
Fintech TraveleCommerce Transportation /
Logistics
And more…

11. 11

12. 16
Journey to successful API business

13. 18
Start with business strategy
Align stakeholders
Everyone from Executives to customer-facing
personnel have to support new direction
Define business outcomes
Revenue growth / time to market / improved
customer self-service ?
Identify target audiences
Large set of unknown developers or
small set of known developers?

14. 19
API Pricing models
Pay per use
• When you have strong variable costs
• Price scales linearly with use
• Low-barrier to adoption
• Revenue is unpredictable
• Pricing varies monthly by developer (harder
to budget)
Pay per individual call
Fixed Quota
• Predictable pricing
• Predictable revenue
• More revenue from low volume developers
• Increases stickiness / build a base of
recurring customers
• Service is blocked after quota is reached
• High-fees subscription can be a barrier to
entry
Fixed number of api calls/objects
per month
Plan + Overage
• Predictable pricing
• Predictable revenue
• More revenue from low volume developers
• Service is always on
• Miscommunication about overages
Fixed number of api calls/objects
per month + pay for additional
volume

15. 20
According to Pay-As-You-Go APIs on RapidAPI
US$ 0.03
Average price-per-call

16. 21
Journey to success
Once a business model has been defined
and you have your first users, you need to
ensure that you check all the boxes when it
comes to your API user-journey.
Understandability
Promotion
Experimentation
Integration
Growth

17. 22
Journey To Success: Understandability
Guides
• A brief summary of the business context
• A getting-started guide
• A step-by-step tutorial
Documentation
1) Explicit overview of requests flow
and webhooks
2) URL endpoints and methods available
3) Online and Interactive
4) OpenAPI 3 compatible
Samples
• For developers to learn how the different
API should be used together
• Postman collections
• RESTful, consistent naming convention, ISO standards
• Simplicity
• Support for simple and advanced use cases
API Design

18. 23
Average Number of Days to Build New API integrations
Source: State of API Integration 2018 report by Cloud Elements

19. 24
Journey To Success: Promotion
SEO / SEM Partnerships
Developer
evangelization
Contents
• Ensure relevance
Irrelevances can result in
unproductive support
interactions
• Highlight use cases
on how API can be used
Maximise visibility
with online marketing
Join ecosystem of
programming building
blocks
• Business tools
CRM, Analytics, Support
platform, Marketing tools
• Identify connecting
services to tie strong
relationships with key-
players
• Joint-offer or a basic
recommendation
Build your API reputation to
drive word-of-mouth
adoption
Unlock new opportunities
by educating about the
applications of your API
Participate in
• Open-source projects
• Technological events
• Partner events
• Hackathons
• Online communities
• Create a blog with articles
about use-cases
• Feature customer
success-stories

20. 25
Journey To Success: Experimentation
Trial
Sandbox
Interactive
documentation
Self service
• To try before buying
• How well API solves pain points
• If business model requires
upfront credits purchase
• To not trigger actual effects
(ex: send a million SMS to
their end-users)
• To avoid spending money
when experimenting
• To be able to mock their
requests with a sandbox
• Show developers a doc that relates to their usage
• An option to populate code snippets with API key
• Show real records in the documentation
• Case study: Airtable API documentation shows real
data from the customer tables
Allow users to get access to
your service in a fully
automated way:
• Provision configuration
• API credentials
• Payment process

21. 26
Journey To Success: Integration
01
03
05
02
04
Standards
SDK
Guidance
Packaged
integrations
Efficient
dashboard
Use standards
as much as possible
• Build a FAQ
• Best practices
• Solutions engineering
• Customer success
To offer some server-sides SDK
in the main programming
languages
To give as much visibility as
possible on the requests they
are sending to you
Identify the most common
tools used alongside your
API and create a standard
integration

22. 27
Journey To Success: Growth
Find new customers
Key account management
Upselling - Cross-selling
Sales team
Marketing
Communicate on features
and animate community
User feedback, identify API
evolution and conceptualise
efficient front-ends
Product management
Support and quality
API and service performances
Customers’ technical issues
Configuration changes
DevOps
Help you grow your
infrastructure as your API grows

23. 28
Challenges to grow an API product
Into a successful business

24. 29
Challenges to grow an API business
01
Quality and Scalability
02
Monetisation
03
Stickiness factor

25. 30
Technical challenges
As businesses become more
dependant on your API, it is key to
ensure that they do not experience
any service disruption
Use different mechanisms to avoid disruption
Clusters, geo-redundancy, disaster recovery plans
Invest in internal tools
To help monitor your uptime and processing time
Ensure APIs are working as expected
Integration tests, analytic tools, monitoring and central logs
aggregation
Uptime

26. 31
Technical challenges
01
03
05
02
04
Elastic infrastructure
Be prepared for rapid growth in advance
Latency improvements
Keep decreasing response time of your API
Scalability
Serving customers on a global scale needs a cloud infrastructure
distributed intelligently and local constraints need to be taken
into account
Global availability

27. 33
Technical challenges
• Customers will integrate your API at any point of time
• Some will turn into loyal customers
• Important to maintain retro-compatibility
Versioning
• GDPR, HIPAA (US)
• Advance encryption and security for
some verticals
(banks, insurance, governments)
• Protection against breaches
• OWASP TOP 10
• Penetration testing, security audits
Security and data protection

28. 34
Challenges: Monetisation
Quantify how much the underlying data or service is worth
(often based on how proprietary it is and its role in generating
value)
Determine what to charge
Quantify revenue streams the APIs open up, and how much
developers and users might be willing to pay to access them
Determine how to charge
There are many additional business models, and much of the value and
revenue is obtained through these other monetization models

29. 35
Challenges: Stickiness factor
To continuously bring more values to your customers
Your API should keep evolving
1
2
3
There will be competitors with better pricing and features, it can then
be difficult to retain more loyal users
To make your customers’ life easier
Integrate with users’ favourite tools
To become more than just a technology provider, to become a
real partner
Expand across more use-cases and new products

30. 36
Ensure that you optimise your
tactics to maximise your journey
to success
Discoverability
Understandability
Experimentation
Integration
Growth

31. 38

32. 39
Thank you!
Wavecell – Asia’s Leading Cloud Communications Platform
hello@wavecell.com
https://wavecell.com
Singapore . Indonesia . Thailand . Hong Kong . Philippines
atrony
Anton Shchekalov