Growth Hacking With APIs

Steve Floyd

, Recovering agency owner, growth, content & design strategy nerd, currently studying comp sci, blockchain & ai with a dash of economics.

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Growth Hacking With APIs by Steve Floyd – CEO of AXZM – www.axzm.com/about/steve-floyd

Some of you who are not familiar with the term are probably like - Growth Hacking?

If you have a picture of a shady hacker sitting in a back room manipulating data…

Wait a minute…

That sounds a lot like the modern digital marketing funnel. Exposure > Discovery > Consideration > Conversion > Relationship > Retention

“Growth Hacking is what startups call marketing.” - Me

In the agency / freelancer / consultant world, it’s all about getting more clients. In the startup / SaaS / product world it’s all about getting more users.

Apples and Oranges. Whether you are an agency or a startup, we all have the same problems.

API – Application Programming InterfaceIn computer programming, an application programming interface (API) specifies a software component in terms of its operations, their inputs and outputs and underlying types. Its main purpose is to define a set of functionalities that are independent of their respective implementation, allowing both definition and implementation to vary without compromising each other. In addition to accessing databases or computer hardware, such as hard disk drives or video cards, an API can be used to ease the work of programming graphical user interface components, to allow integration of new features into existing applications (a so-called "plug-in API"), or to share data between otherwise distinct applications. In practice, many times an API comes in the form of a library that includes specifications for routines, data structures, object classes, and variables. In some other cases, notably for SOAP and REST services, an API comes as just a specification of remote calls exposed to the API consumers

For the non-technical people in my audience looking at this slide - Say what?

Users and Client both come down to revenue for the business and without revenue, you’re not in business.

For the non-technical people in my audience looking at this slide - Say what?

A major convergence Is happening

Web services like hosting, processing, storage, email, web crawling and just about everything / anything you can thing of is available for pennies on the dollar.

Back in 2012, there were only 5,018 public APIs.

As of today, there are 11,919 public APIs documented on Programmable Web. There is more data available now than ever before.

That is a 50% increase in just over 2 years. Imagine the wealth of data that will be available in another 2-3 years. We are just starting to scratch the surface of what is possible.

In a recent report by Incapsula, it is estimated that 61.5% of web traffic is actually bots. This is revealing and shows that the amount of people actively scraping the web for all types of data is increasing.

It’s been proven again and again in business - Data-driven companies outperform their competitors financially.

Let’s look at some ways we can Growth Hack Infrastructure with APIs.

Don’t have the money to buy servers? Rather than setting up your own IT infrastructure, you can leverage Iron.io to handle the heavy lifting. They offer one of the best solutions available to offload resource intensive application tasks, like web crawling and queue management.

Google Apps Engine has a robust API and is very competitive with Amazon in many ways.

Heroku can help remove the strain, cost and complexity with deploying your apps. Their API is very robust and offers tons of documentation.

Digital Ocean created one of the fastest and most convenient cloud technology to help you easily and more efficiently manage your infrastructure so you can get back to coding. They provide all of their users with high-performance SSD Hard Drives, a flexible API, and the ability to select the nearest data center location.

Stamplay completely removes the infrastructure woes commonly faced by in-house devs who are tasked with deploying small business apps.

Mailgun has a great API for email, definitely worth checking out. They are priced better than most other providers.

Benchmark is a great email infrastructure solution if you do not want to worry about your server getting blacklisted as well as maintaining that infrastructure.

Braintree is another payment processing API that offers almost identical features / functions as strip.

Authorize.net Payment API is one of the most robust and widely supported, but not as pretty or intuitive as Stripe or Benchmark.

Local Business

Factual has a robust local API.

Google Maps is the gold standard, but there are other solutions available.

Bing Maps is one of the best map APIs available.

Yelp has an awesome business API.

The idea with Segment.io is simple: one pipeline for all your data. Send data to any third-party tool with a single integration.

Google’s Analytics API is one of the most robust analytic platforms available. Be aware of daily / hourly limits and requests if your application of resource intensive, they will cut you off and have strict guidelines.

Keen IO was built to collect and store huge amounts of event data – those constant little interactions that happen all day, every day, in your apps. You send ‘em, and we store ‘em in our cloud database, so you can play around with them whenever you’d like.

The Mixpanel API is one of the best mobile application analytic platforms available.

Cyfe has a flexible dashboard to display all types of business analytic data.

Google’s Prediction API could be used by an ecommerce vendor to determine the best type of content to serve up to their customers for a seasonal promotion.

Mashape has one of the best API management platforms available.

Data Storage, Extraction & Manipulation

Crawlbot applies their Automatic APIs or your own Custom API to intelligently extract entire sites. Whether for product pricing data, historical weather, content migration or even three years of Hacker News archives, Crawlbot recognizes the right pages and structures them accordingly.

About MeFor the last decade I have been creating digital marketing solutions for businesses large and small. In that time I’ve learned a few things about making data-driven marketing decisions for my companies and the clients I’ve worked for. I believe all companies should be aware of the wealth of data available on the web and integrate that data into their decision making and marketing processes where possible.