We launched our first B2B product recently, and the APIs are now available for integration. This took a lot of commitment and effort from our team (no surprises there), and I figured it was worth sharing the journey. Hope it helps you (if we known some of this before we started, it would have helped us).
A brief history of our company.
Snowpal is a Software Product company that offers several products. We started off as a B2C company and built our first offering a few years ago. It is a Project Management Web App that will help you manage both personal and professional projects of all sizes. We followed that up by building Native Mobile Apps, for both iOS and Android, to support a majority of features available on our Web App. Very recently, we launched our first B2B product in the form of 8 APIs that companies building Web, Mobile and/or Server Side solutions can seamlessly integrate with.
Without further ado, let’s get started. About a year ago, we explored the idea of building a second Mobile App to solve a different problem (one that is very different from what our current app addresses). As a full stack development team that has done something like this several dozen times, we began to go about our business — socialize the idea with our team members, write detailed requirements, create architectures, and kick off both UI and API related development work.
Our API team is quite used to writing new APIs and endpoints all the time so they hit the ground running immediately. However, this time around, something slightly different happened. A realization dawned upon this. A realization that the process of building APIs may be a bit overwhelming for companies/teams that may not have done this necessarily before. Or, even if they are very used to doing it, it may or may not be something they actually might want to focus their energies on. As it is, there’s a number of things you have to be worried about when you kick off a new product offering, and depending on the size of your team, there may be one too many things to do. (We’ve always felt that).
So, we asked ourselves if we should make life a tad easier for other organizations by doing some (if not all) of the backend heavy lifting for them. This would allow them to focus on building what they really want to quickly build and in turn, drastically improve their Time to Market. And the answer to the earlier question, across our team, was an astounding Yes.
If someone had the API ready for us to consume, we would have been thrilled as that would have granted us the luxury to spend 95% of our time in building the UI/UX, and not worry one bit about what’s happening on the server side.
That’s when we decided we would foray into the B2B market. It was about time.
We changed our priorities, altered our RoadMap, and shifted gears to building our very first B2B product! Were we a bit overwhelmed? Maybe. But it was hard to tell as we were super thrilled and all we could feel was the excitement of doing something we hadn’t done before (not for ourselves, that is).
The idea of building a rich set of APIs for other companies to consume was exhilarating to say the least. By doing this, we would allow other teams to get their product offerings out to market a whole lot sooner. The idea, as depicated in the simple diagram below, was quite simple — no matter the client, they should all be able to leverage the power of our APIs.
Okay, now that we had clarity on what we wanted to do, the next logical question was: how to go about doing it? And most importantly, where to start.
Well, that’s another article, and for another day. This has been a long journey. You sure didn’t expect me to cover all of that in one go, and in a single article, did you? :)
Snowpal Products
Backends as Services on AWS Marketplace
Mobile Apps on App Store and Play Store
Web App
Education Platform for Learners and Course Creators