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Ask HN: How to Sell APIs?
11 points by mdang on March 31, 2021 | hide | past | favorite | 10 comments
Hi, I'm preparing to reach out to companies to sell an API-based product.

If I were to send cold-emails to a bunch of companies, what should I include in that short email that are the most important to close a sale? Is a demo important, and what kind of demo is the most effective? Who within the company is best to contact? What is on the minds of the companies, that I can help answer? When should I follow up again?

Please give me any pointers you have if you have built API-based startups, and particularly have experience selling APIs.

Thank you!




Disclaimer: What follows is not pontification, but a few questions I ask myself as well when dealing with this...

>Hi, I'm preparing to reach out to companies to sell an API-based product.

You mean a money-saving-or-money-making-based product? Can you post a link? It could interest people here.

>If I were to send cold-emails to a bunch of companies, what should I include in that short email that are the most important to close a sale?

Do these companies have the problem your product solves? Is it important for them? There are many companies sending us emails about their solutions to problems we either don't have, or that we do have but simply don't care about. It's either not urgent, or doesn't cost that much, or we have a way of dealing with that, or we simply do not trust the product, or we're not required to do it a certain way, or a combination of these.

It helps if you have that problem yourself and you're dogfooding and it's saving you or making you something.

What kind of pricing? What kind of products can be built on top of this API, and who would either create these products or use them? Can we imagine a product you build on top of that that you distribute, maybe open-source, which hits your API?


Share your API in developer community and get feedbacks which speaks for themseleves.


I think there were some marketplaces for APIs, I remember seeing multiple marketplaces like https://rapidapi.com/



Don’t tell, show!


That is in fact the plan.

We have a working product -- the thing is we have built out a whole UI and was hoping for end consumers to come to the site, but now we are trying to go to companies and to sell the API directly. Obviously I can just direct them to the end-consumer site, and that would be the demo, or I can wrap our API around something like RapidAPI, so that they can call the API -- not sure which one would be more effective.

Also we don't have really a landing page, it is just a site that does what the product does, not sure if it is better to direct the companies to a landing page, rather than just the current site.


Agree! It really depends on what your product is, just about everything has an API these days. If you are only selling APIs, then likely developers are your target users, but are they the buyers?


that is also what I'm wondering about, if it is better to contact the BD team who might be more aware of what value the product will bring, or if it is better to contact the developers who would be working with the API.


You have to convince both, if you haven't read The Challenger Sale, it's highly recommended

*convince is not a great word


thanks! will read.




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