

API First, Mobile Second, Web Third - bjonathan
http://www.switzer.org/post/1660159298/a-vc-mobile-first-web-second-continued

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brlewis
Solve a problem someone has first. Rarely will that solution be an API. Advice
is never universally right or universally wrong, but the advice in this post
is _almost_ universally wrong.

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maxklein
API first is actually right in my opinion. Software is very multi-platform now
: if you build the API first and then build the clients on top of that, you
can make the clients completely decoupled from the server, allowing you to
quickly switch platforms.

Technically, API first is a good thing. I don't know about from a business
sense.

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brlewis
From a business sense you want to ship a minimum viable product as soon as
possible. There may be teams that could do this most efficiently via the
architecture you describe. I think most will work faster with one less tier.

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switzer
Shipping an MVP with the most basic UI that gets JSON data from the server is
fast and usable.

It was difficult to do this in the past, because browsers could not support
the data that returned from the server without a lot of work. Today, JQuery
that can present the data with minimum effort.

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MicahWedemeyer
So much hate on the web these days. Mobile is great, so are APIs, but the web
still has some life left. Don't count it out just yet.

Match your platform to your problem and expand as necessary.

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terra_t
<http://ookaboo.com/>

did web and API simultaneously -- mobile will happen when revenue or
investment comes in and I can hire a team to do it.

The API has been a tough sell, however, because it's doing something entirely
new. It's also got the issue that I don't know how to monetize it, whereas the
web can monetize just fine. On the other hand, landing just one major API user
can send me enough traffic that my competitors won't know what hit them...

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woodall
After clicking around, I still have no idea what your app does.

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terra_t
image search that works.

Look for something on Google image search and typically the same image will
show up in 25% of the first page of results and precision can be anywhere
between 10-75%.

Image search is still so bad today that people don't even believe it can be
made better. Defined in a certain narrow way, the Ookaboo API is > 99%
accurate, however, there are common cases (categorizable) where its view of
reality doesn't match other people's. For instance, Ookaboo might show you a
picture of a person that is associated with a place instead of the place
itself, or it might show you a picture of something that an artist made rather
than show you a picture of the artist. We've got answers to that under
development

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waterside81
Don't think I've heard someone phrase it this way, but I agree (in some cases)
- API first is a good way to go, if only to enforce proper abstractions on the
server side. We launched our product as an API only (and it still is) and then
segmented some API calls as paid calls, and others as free. Our entire
business so far is just very simple API calls. It's a remarkably efficient
operational model since the payloads tend to be small therefore each response-
request cycle is lighting fast.

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awt
I would amend this to something more like: find customers first, then build
the thing they want in simplest way that satisfies their needs.

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pedalpete
Another reason not mentioned is that you are giving your API credibility and
testing it by using the API in your own product. You get to consider the
different things that customers might want to do with your API and consider
the strategic effects of including features x over feature y.

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foobarbazetc
If you care about making money -- Mobile First, Web Second, API Third (though
web and API kind of go together, so how about both at the same time? :)

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kristianp
It sounds like some people have just heard about multi-tier!

