Top 100 Public APIs for Developer

As a beginner developer, some of the first questions you’ll ask yourself and others are:

• What projects should I work on as a beginner?
• What makes a good side project?
• Where should I start?

If you aren’t fond of the basic to-do list, calculator, or some type of clone answers, then the perfect place to start is by building interesting applications around public-facing REST APIs!

What Is an API?

API stands for Application Programming Interface. Don’t worry about the Application Programming part — focus on Interface. You use interfaces all the time. Your keyboard is an interface. An ATM. A search engine.

An interface sits on top of a complicated system and simplifies things for you, saving you from needing to know every complex detail of what’s under the hood. It’s a simple way to use smart things.

What Is a REST API?

REST API stands for Representable State Transfer Application Programming Interface. Ultimately, you can think of them as a shortcut into a web service’s database. They provide a set of methods that a programmer can use via HTTP to send and receive data.

Companies won’t just let you log into their internal database and look around, but they will give you an easier way to access it in certain limited ways using their API. Some have limitations on the number of times you can call, some require signing up to receive a private API Key, and some require setting up OAuth for users to log in securely.

You may also like: What the difference between REST API and RESTful API?

This List

These APIs are ones I’ve personally come across and thought were cool, fun, interesting, and different — giving you an edge on your next project!

They are totally free, don’t require you to figure out how to handle OAuth, and are super easy to get started.

Categories

These are the categories these APIs are under, in this order:

• **Animals** (5)
• **Anime** (5)
• **Art** ( 5)
• **Crime** (5)
• **Cryptocurrency** (5)
• **Drink** (5)
• **Food** (5)
• **Games** (6)
• **Health** (5)
• **Humor** (9)
• **Machine Learning** (5)
• **Mapping** (5)
• **Movies** (6)
• **Music** (6)
• **Space** (6)
• **Sports** ( 5)
• **Travel** (6)
• **Weather** (6)

1. Animals

Cat Facts

Send a daily cat fact via text message.

Dog API

Access and integrate over 20,000 dog images based on the Stanford Dogs Dataset.

IUCN Red List

List of threatened species and provides an evaluation of the conservation status of plant and animal species.

RescueGroups.org APIs

Live adoptable pet data queries including radius searches, animal-specific locations, animal-specific contact information, rescue and shelter searches, species, breeds, colors, patterns, and qualities lists.

The Whale Hotline

Explore marine mammal sighting data.

2. Anime

Anime News Network Encyclopedia

Holds over 20,000 anime and manga titles and returns key encyclopedia data in XML format.

Studio Ghibli

Access the catalogs of the people, places, and things found in the worlds of Ghibli.

Jikan

The most active online anime + manga community and database.

Pokémon

All the Pokémon data you’ll ever need in one place.

What Anime

Trace back the original anime by screenshot. Searches over 22,300 hours of anime to find the best matching scene.

3. Art

Burning Man’s PlayaEvents

Provides programmatic access to information describing events, theme camps, art installations, and streets.

Poems

Return poem of the day and random poems. You can also search for poems based on author, tag, and keyword, and you can access a private poem collection.

Harvard Art Museum

Explore and integrate the museum’s collections in your projects and access data about objects, people, exhibitions, publications, and galleries.

Queeky

Add QueekyPaint to your personal blog or website.

Svrf

Search and experience the largest database of immersive face filters, 360 videos, and 360 photos.

4. Crime

FBI Wanted

Easily get information on the FBI Wanted program.

Jailbase

Get access to a database of mugshots and arrest data sourced from many counties across the U.S.

NFL Arrest

Get NFL arrest data.

Sweat & Toil

Integrates information on child labor and forced labor taken from the reports “Findings on the Worst Forms of Child Labor,” “List of Goods Produced by Child Labor or Forced Labor,” and “List of Products Produced by Forced or Indentured Child Labor.”

BikeWise

A place to learn about and report bike crashes, hazards, and thefts.

5. Cryptocurrency

Blockchain API

Send and receive payment from Blockchain Wallets, transactions, and blocks data.

CoinAPI

Market data on 274 Currency Exchanges integrated under a single API.

CoinDesk

Access data from the Bitcoin Price Index, which represents an average of bitcoin prices across leading global exchanges.

ExchangeRate

Free currency conversion on 50 currencies used in 70+ countries.

Rates API

Current and historical foreign exchange rates.

6. Drinks

BARZZ

Quick and easy access to the most detailed information on bar and club venues across the U.S. with over 30,000 businesses.

BreweryDB

An open library of breweries and beers.

CocktailDB

Database of drinks and cocktail recipes from around the world.

Untappd

Allows users to socially share with friends the beer they’re currently enjoying as well as where they’re enjoying it.

Wine-Searcher

A search engine of the price lists of 24,909 wine stores around the world.

7. Food

FatSecret Platform

Complete access to a comprehensive database of accurate food and nutrition information as well as exercise and weight management tools.

Fruityvice

Provides data for all kinds of fruit!

Street Food App API

Add food trucks’ scheduled stops to an app or website.

TacoFancy

A community-driven taco recipe repository.

Zomato

Access to the freshest and most exhaustive information for over 1.5 million restaurants across 10,000 cities globally.

8. Games

CheapShark

A service that tracks the prices of PC games on sites like Amazon, Steam, and GamersGate and shows shoppers the best deals.

Fortnite Tracker

Provides Fornite BR player stats, match history, score, and active challenges from Fortnite.

Magic: The Gathering

Provides access to game card information like boocard ID, name, type, statistics, printing information, rating and votes, and more.

Overwolf

Create extensions for video games, which are then made available via the Overwolf Appstore.

Pinball Map

Access data on pinball locations for public pinball machines.

Smashlounge

Provides a compendium for Super Smash Brothers Melee, associated with groups, techniques, characters, and attacks.

9. Health

BetterDoctor

Detailed information about doctors in your area.

EndlessMedical API

Using artificial intelligence, this API lets you connect users’ symptoms and complaints with test results and a doctor’s examination. It then provides a list of possible diagnoses.

FluTrack

Data on influenza symptoms from processing and displaying influenza-related Twitter messages.

NeuroVault

A public repository of unthresholded statistical maps, parcellations, and atlases of the brain.

PredictBGL Diabetes

Record and manage diabetes information.

10. Humor

Be Like Bill

Create and use Be like Bill memes.

Chuck Norris Facts

Hand curated Chuck Norris facts!

Fuck Off as a Service

Scalable solution to the common problem of telling people to fuck off.

Geeky Joke

Fetch a random geeky/programming related joke.

I Can Haz Dad Joke

Largest selections of dad jokes; fetch a random joke or a specific joke, or search for jokes in a variety of formats.

Kanye.Rest

Random Kanye West quotes.

Meme Generator

Generate memes by choosing preloaded images and short top and bottom text sentences.

Ron Swanson Quotes

Access Ron Swanson quotes directly.

Tronald Dump

An archive for the dumbest things Donald Trump has ever said.

11. Machine Learning

Cloudmersive

Advanced Machine Learning APIs for recognizing and processing images.

PixLab

Process and analyze input media images or video content. Allows you to process, transform, and filter any images from any programming language with machine vision and deep learning APIs.

PredictionIO

An open-source Machine Learning Server built on top of an open-source stack for developers and data scientists to create predictive engines for any machine learning task.

RxNLP Sentence Clustering

Can group sentences (such as sentences from multiple news articles) or short texts (such as posts from Twitter or Facebook Status Updates) into logical groups.

Wit.AI

A natural open-source language processing platform that offers the function to add intelligent speech functionality to web and mobile applications.

12. Mapping

Google Earth Engine

Provides a library of functions that may be applied to imagery for display and analysis.

Here

Create and customize digital maps based on HERE Maps data.

Mapbox

Create and customize beautiful digital maps.

On Water

An API for determining if a point (latitude and longitude) is on water or land.

uebermaps

Discover and share maps with friends of your favorite spots.

13. Movies

Harry Potter

Returns spell routes, character routes, house, and sorting hat routes.

The New York Times Movie Review

Access over 22,000 movie reviews by the New York Times critics from today back to 1924.

The Star Wars

All the Star Wars data you’ve ever wanted: planets, spaceships, vehicles, people, films, and speciesfrom all the Star Wars films.

Star Wars Quotes

Returns quotes from Star Wars films. You can even choose to get quotes from the Dark Side!

The Marvel

Access information about Marvel’s library of comics — from new to old.

Netflix Roulette

Returns a random Netflix title based on a user’s input, including genre, rating, and whether it is a movie or a TV show.

14. Music

Bandsintown

Allows you to view local concerts, gives live music recommendations, lists an artist’s events, and provides users with the ability to buy tickets and RSVP to events.

Genrenator

Fetch a random genre or genre story.

MusixMatch

Display lyrics of over 13M tracks on your app or website.

Niland

Easily build powerful music search and discovery into your applications by encapsulating cutting-edge deep learning-based technologies. It finds musically similar tracks and classifies music into hundreds of labels.

Songsterr

Allows you to search, get, and present songs and guitar, bass, and drums tabs and chords from the Songsterr database.

SoundCloud

Discover, stream, and share a constantly expanding mix of music.

15. Space

Auroras.Live

Friendly way of accessing various aurora hunting data: current space weather conditions, weather, skycams, satellite images, and archived information from the past 15 years.

International Space Station Current Location

Access data on the current location of the International Space Station, which travels at 28,000 km/h.

Launch Library

Information on upcoming space launches.

Mercury Retrograde

Allows you to determine whether Mercury is in retrograde for a given date.

NASA

NASA has a bunch of different open APIs — like near Earth object data, images of Mars, astronomy picture of the day, Mars weather data, plus much more!

Open Astronomy Catalogs API

Provides machine-readable access to curated astronomy catalogs, including supernovae, tidal disruptions of stars, kilonovae, and fast stars.

16. Sports

Balldontlie

Access statistical data from the NBA.

SportsDB

A database of sports metadata with events, TV listings, artwork, and scores.

Soccer Sports Open Data

Allow you to manage data for every single match they store on their database.

SuredBits

Query their NFL, NBA, and Crypto Exchange data.

Yahoo’s Fantasy Sports API

Provides rich data on leagues, teams, and player information.

17. Travel

BlaBlaCar Search

Search for carpool trips, just as the BlaBlaCar’s website does.

FlightStats Weather API

Up-to-date information on current weather conditions at an airport using tag annotations to identify prevailing conditions and notable hazards that may impact aviation.

GraphHopper

Integrate A-to-B route planning, turn-by-turn navigation, route optimization, isochrone calculations, and more.

REFUGE Restrooms

Safe restroom access for transgender, intersex, and gender-nonconforming individuals — search restrooms by proximity to a search location, add new restroom listings, and comment and rate existing listings.

Travelbriefing

Access to country-specific information about travel regulations, prevailing environmental conditions, health & vaccines, weather, visa requirements, currency, electric sockets, and language.

Walk Score

Calculates travel times between an origin and a set of destinations. Visualize travel times on a map and supports walking, public transit, driving, and biking times.

18. Weather

ClimbingWeather

Up-to-date weather data for climbing areas in the U.S.

DiveSites

Returns database information for scuba divers including location, weather, latitude and longitude, map, and tide stations.

OpenUV

Fetch global real-time UV index forecast — indispensable sun safety details.

OpenWeatherMap Air Pollution

Access a carbon monoxide index for any location on Earth!

RainViewer

Provides access to mapping data of rainfall based on information from weather radars globally.

Wunderground

Local and long-range weather forecast, weather reports, maps, and tropical weather conditions for locations worldwide in 80 languages.

What to Do With Them

The best place to start is by getting and displaying data. Maybe it’s sending a cat photo a day to someone, creating a joke generator, or sending updates to yourself on what the temperature is at a certain time — the ideas are endless.

If you still feel stuck, many of the links above will share different projects that were built using their API. Check them out, jot some ideas down, and have some fun!

You may also like: What the difference between REST API and RESTful API?

Thanks for reading, Keep visiting. If you liked this post, share it with all of your programming buddies!

#api #rest api #restful api #programming #developer

What is GEEK

Buddha Community

54% of Developers Cite Lack of Documentation as the Top Obstacle to Consuming APIs

Recently, I worked with my team at Postman to field the 2020 State of the API survey and report. We’re insanely grateful to the folks who participated—more than 13,500 developers and other professionals took the survey, helping make this the largest and most comprehensive survey in the industry. (Seriously folks, thank you!) Curious what we learned? Here are a few insights in areas that you might find interesting:

API Reliability

Whether internal, external, or partner, APIs are perceived as reliable—more than half of respondents stated that APIs do not break, stop working, or materially change specification often enough to matter. Respondents choosing the “not often enough to matter” option here came in at 55.8% for internal APIs, 60.4% for external APIs, and 61.2% for partner APIs.

Obstacles to Producing APIs

When asked about the biggest obstacles to producing APIs, lack of time is by far the leading obstacle, with 52.3% of respondents listing it. Lack of knowledge (36.4%) and people (35.1%) were the next highest.

#api #rest-api #apis #api-first-development #api-report #api-documentation #api-reliability #hackernoon-top-story

Public ASX100 APIs: The Essential List

We’ve conducted some initial research into the public APIs of the ASX100 because we regularly have conversations about what others are doing with their APIs and what best practices look like. Being able to point to good local examples and explain what is happening in Australia is a key part of this conversation.

Method

The method used for this initial research was to obtain a list of the ASX100 (as of 18 September 2020). Then work through each company looking at the following:

1. Whether the company had a public API: this was found by googling “[company name] API” and “[company name] API developer” and “[company name] developer portal”. Sometimes the company’s website was navigated or searched.
2. Some data points about the API were noted, such as the URL of the portal/documentation and the method they used to publish the API (portal, documentation, web page).
3. Observations were recorded that piqued the interest of the researchers (you will find these below).
4. Other notes were made to support future research.
5. You will find a summary of the data in the infographic below.

Data

With regards to how the APIs are shared:

• Documentation is where just the Swagger/OpenAPI docs are hosted somewhere. e.g. https://api.linkgroup.com/member/docs/index
• Portal is where an interactive portal has been developed. e.g. https://dev.telstra.com/
• The web page is where the company has a single page that isn’t interactive explaining their Public APIs. e.g. https://www.bendigoadelaide.com.au/banking-products-api.asp

#api #api-development #api-analytics #apis #api-integration #api-testing #api-security #api-gateway

A Simple Guide to API Development Tools

APIs can be as simple as 1 endpoint for use by 100s of users or as complex as the AWS APIs with 1000s of endpoints and 100s of thousands of users. Building them can mean spending a couple of hours using a low-code platform or months of work using a multitude of tools. Hosting them can be as simple as using one platform that does everything we need or as complex as setting up and managing ingress control, security, caching, failover, metrics, scaling etc.

What they all have in common are three basic steps to go from nothing to a running API.

Each of these steps has its own set of tools. Here are some I’ve used and popular alternatives.

Design

REST is the most popular API interface and has the best tooling. Our design output for REST services always includes an OpenAPI specification. The specification language can be tricky to get right in JSON (how many curly brackets?) or YAML (how many spaces?) so a good editor saves a lot of time.

Four popular ones are:

• Swagger
• Postman
• Insomnia
• Stoplight

I’ve only used Swagger and Postman but both Insomnia and Stoplight look interesting. All of them offer additional functionality like documentation, testing and collaboration so are much more than just specification generators.

#api #apis #api-development #restful-api #rest-api #development-tools #app-development-tools #developer-tools

Tracking a Developer’s Journey From Documentation Visit

If your business model involves selling to developers, you probably have already realized that much of the traditional processes and metrics applicable to traditional enterprise sales or consumer marketing don’t work. Specifically, selling to developers usually means attracting them to your platform and helping them succeed in building something, whether that’s a new app, integration, or automating an internal process. Getting developers to adopt your platform can be daunting and requires investment in product, onboarding and developer experience, and documentation. However, there are few tools product managers and developer relations leaders can leverage to measure and improve that experience.

Web and mobile analytics tools like Mixpanel and Amplitude can only measure activity on the website itself, yet most developer platforms price on what happens with the API, not via website activity. On the other hand, most API monitoring tools can only track infrastructure metrics like requests per minute and CPU utilization without any context of the user. To accurately measure your adoption and conversion funnel, you need to track usage across your entire platform from initial ad click and sign up, to what a new developer does with your API.

What is the developer-first marketing strategy

Most developer-first platforms have a B2D (business2developer) go to market strategy which is uniquely different from B2C companies which drive consumer adoption, but also different from B2B companies who maintain large sales forces to push their solution to other businesses. In reality, B2D sits somewhere in the middle between B2B and B2C.

B2D is like B2C in that:

• Self-service signups and credit card payments takes priority over sales demos and contract negotiation
• Low-cost acquisition channels like SEO-optimized content, SEM, and partnerships are prioritized over large and expensive sales development teams sending emails.
• Because almost everything is self-serve and online, you can be very data-driven in terms of product metrics focused over just focusing on 1:1 relationships.

B2D is also like B2B in that:

• The developer still works at a company who is buying to solve a pain rather than an individual looking for the latest gadget or online hangout spot.
• Sales processes can still be complex involving multiple stakeholders and require technical validation.
• Developers are still humans implementing a complex solution and may need high-touch dedicated support vs B2C where support is super transactional handling password resets and returns.

Building a cross-platform funnel across web and API

API product managers can focus on any number of initiatives at any given time, whether that;s API features, pricing and packaging, or top of the funnel acquisition. In order to know which area to focus, you should map out your _entire_funnel from very first ad click to a fully activated customer paying and referring other customers. The beginning of your funnel might start on your website as a visitor signs up to use your API. However, once they created an API key, much of the magic happens on the API side rather than the web side. Many developer platforms build their business model around usage-based pricing, which means your revenue is correlated to API usage, not website usage.

Funnel StageSourceDescriptionWhat to look forSigned UpWebsiteThe first step a developer makes is to show interest in your platform. For developer tools, this usually means signing up and generating an API key.Your analytics solution should be tracking which channel the user came from using UTM parameters, referrer tracking, etc along with which page drove the signup.Made first API CallAPIThis is a huge milestone as many signups never reach this stage. The developer was able to understand your API and give it a spin.Monitor TTFHW (Time to First Hello World) and conversion rate. You should continue looking at which channels drive the most activations.Made over 100 API CallsAPIAfter a 100 or so API calls, you could consider the developer “active”, in that they built a real integration rather than just testing with Postman or CurlA low conversion rate from the last step could imply difficulties with your SDK or unclear integration steps.Approaching Free LimitsAPIMost API products are priced on usage. In order to become a paying customer, they need to exceed some limit.If very few long-term “active” developers exceed their limits,then you may need to optimize your packaging and pricing.Converted to PayingWebsiteCongrats! You now have paying customers.Most developers have more than one value metric they price on. Keep an eye on which ones are driving paid conversions.Evangelized your APIWebsiteAre developers sharing and discussing your platform online?By adding a mechanism to track referrals, you can see which channels and mediums are performing the best. A complete analytics platform can track UTM parameters and things like referring domain. With a mechanism to generate unique links pere customer, you can also track which types of customers share the most.

Linking web with API activity for users and companies

Business2developer go to market models have elements of both B2C and B2B and involve both individual developers and also companies or accounts. It also involves cross-platform tracking across web and APIs. This can complicate accurate funnel and conversion reporting. Do you track an individual user sign up funnel or do you track companies who integrated and use the API? What happens if a developer clicks on an AdWord and signs up using his or her GitHub account but doesn’t do anything. If the person invited a colleague to do integration, then that person may only be attributed to “direct traffic” or “invite referral” depending on your marketing attribution. We need to still attribute the successful integration to an AdWord click.

One way to solve this is mapping out a 4x4 grid to track:

Developers active on APICompanies active on APIDevelopers active on websiteCompanies active on website

Not all API platforms will follow this model and may fill some boxes with a don’t care. For example, many APIs don’t care or track which developer is accessing the API, yet it’s important to understand which company is using the API. In this case, we want to track the following:

_Not Applicable_Companies active on APIDevelopers active on websiteCompanies active on website

Solving the cross-platform tracking

In order to solve this, analytics platforms like Moesif link everything through user ids and company ids regardless of the sessions. Your API and website should use the same identities regardless of the platform for accurate reporting. By modeling companies as groups of users, the linking can be simplified. This provides flexibility in picking and choosing whether to track usage only at the user-level, only at the company-level, or both for the API and website separately.

While having permanent identifiers are great, sometimes we don’t have all information available when the API call or user action is logged. To solve for these cases, we leverage the website session token or API key to uniquely identify the person and company. An alias table that links both session tokens to user/company ids and also API keys to user/company ids enable end to end funnel tracking.

Closing thoughts

Tracking usage and retention accurately is critical in 2020 as leadership shifts from a growth at all costs to efficient growth driven from product optimizations. You can no longer just measure vanity metrics like pageviews and signups. Instead, you should be measuring the entire funnel and understand the inputs that impact each stage. How does changes to your pricing and packaging modify your conversion rates from active developer to converted paying customer.

#api management #developer marketing #developer relations #developer experience #api adoption #developer advocacy #developer advocate #api product #api program #developer evangelism

How to Market to Developers with Paid Marketing

At Moesif, we primarily market to developers and other technical audiences like product managers and developer relations teams looking to make their own developer platform successful. Getting developers to adopt your API or tool is hard and requires heavy investment in experimentation and measurement in order to achieve the results you’re looking for. At the same time, much of the online advice you hear for B2C or B2B marketing simply won’t work when marketing to developers. This article outlines much of the findings we’ve seen as we grew Moesif from 0 to now over 5,000 companies including Deloitte, UPS, and Radar.

What makes developer marketing hard

Before jumping into things you should be trying, let’s review what’s so special and hard about marketing to developers. Most developer-focused companies are founded and led by developers themselves, so you would think figuring out things like product marketing should be easy right? After all, you’re just marketing to yourselves. Just like any audience, there is no single developer persona.

Accurate measurement is difficult

Fast and iterative experimentation is critical to recoup any investment in paid ads. If you’re not diligently tracking your metrics, you can easily run up your cost per acquisition (CPA). However, what do you actually measure against for a developer tools company? Accurate attribution can be complicated since for many developer-tools, the majority of the value and magic your product creates is via an API or integration, not via a mobile or web app. This means a user who signed up and clicked around your website isn’t necessarily a converted user. Yet, there is some intent based on the content or areas of the product a user is looking at. For most developer-first companies, we recommend looking at a metric such as developers who made their first API call. Later, you can define additional funnel stages such as developers who made more than X transactions through your API or developers who used Y different features. Additional complication comes from attributing back to the marketing channel since now you have to instrument both your website to track the acquisition channels a developer went through and then linking that to what the developer did with your API.

Targeting is hard

Most social ad networks are designed to target general consumers based on personal demographic data, not developers. You can target consumers with these networks with simple Yes or No filtering. Such as Does the person live in San Francisco or Is the person aged between 18 and 24 years old. This means if you’re a pizza shop in San Francisco, it’s relatively easy to set up Facebook ads to target college students aged 18 to 24 who live in or around San Francisco. This demographic may be ideal late nite pizza customers.

For developer’s there is no single “is developer” demographic that can be answered via a simple Yes or No question. You could attempt something like _Is their college degree Computer Science”, but software engineering is a career with a variety of educational paths and does not always require a computer science degree. Even if you could match on a person’s title, software engineering is an ambiguous role with varying responsibilities. Some engineering develop embedded systems for cars and drones, some software engineers are focused on building internal data analytics infrastructure, others are integrating billing APIs.

Many developer tools are in horizontal markets targeting a variety of markets rather than singling out a specific industry, but they solve a specific problem. Like enterprise sales, this means you need to target the right developer who will have a use for your devtool and champion it internally.

• If you’re building a billing API, you need to target the guru in charge of billing infrastructure
• If you’re building analytics tools, you need to target the product manager or engineering manager that’s the de facto analytics expert
• If you’re building a new tool for docker, you need to target the devops master who happens to also be a Linux master.

Many stakeholders

The art of selling to developers is similar to most complex enterprise sales processes which have a multitude of stakeholders involved. For devtools, the number of stakeholders can be even more than traditional SaaS since you may have architecture review, security sign off, implementation, etc. This is because many times developers are checking out your tool or product for a corporation, not just for themselves. Handling these complications can be rolled into your marketing plan, rather than waiting until last minute objection handling.

Developers are skeptical

Technical audiences are by nature skeptical. They love to build things, not buy services. This creates inherent biases as they are exposed to third party solutions. Due to internal political struggles, some developers may have resentment or bias against sales and marketing teams. This makes direct outreach less effective. While it does work for certain top-down sales strategies such as for selling security software to CISOs, many devtools are trying to get an individual developer to first adopt the tool and then grow from there.

Paid inbound marketing

One of the most effective ways to attract developers to your platform (rather than filling their email box) is with inbound marketing. Inbound marketing is the art of attracting or pulling in developers to adopt your platform rather than forcibly pushing your platform on to them. There are a variety of techniques for inbound marketing from SEO to referrals, but the focus of this article is paid ads.

Why is inbound great for developers

As mentioned, developers are usually skeptical of traditional marketing activities. Whether this is an email from a SDR that is two paragraphs too long or a huge banner that says “Sign up now.” Being numbers-driven, they would rather cut through the bullshit and explore how something works themselves rather than be told how something works by a non-technical person. Developers also love to tinker and discover. That feeling of discovery though is a strong emotion. Think of the last time you discovered some new life hack or website that became your favorite and told your friends. That’s what inbound marketing leverages.

Effectively inbound marketing makes it appear that the developer discovered a new tool or platform on their own when in fact they were marketed to.

How to do inbound marketing with paid advertising

When done right, paid ads can drive adoption with low acquisition cost, but it requires much more planning and support than simply dumping a bucket of money on Facebook ads. If done incorrectly, you’ll still be pushing your product. The key is to be natural.

First you should decide on the goals of these initiatives, such as:

• Brand exposure and driving traffic
• Creating new leads and developer signups
• Pushing existing leads to integrate your APIs
• Converting developers to pay or have a larger deployment

Once you have your core objectives, you can lay out a content strategy to be used for social ads just like you would create a SEO strategy and keyword planner. Content is the number one item that makes your ads appear inbound. Content should be genuine and interesting to developers, but still relatable to the specific pain your tool solves.

It’s a fine line how specific you want to be. If you go too broad, then you’re not really pulling in the right developers that would adopt your solution. You can’t push out content that tells a developer to sign up when they don’t yet recognize they even have a problem. The way to solve for this is mapping the above goals to content that targets various stages of buying funnel:

Awareness/Exposure

• Should be informational, resourceful, stuff like How to XXX, and best practices for YYY
• Examples include: Moesif’s API Guide, Launch Darkly’s FeatureFlags, Hubspot’s Website Grader
• Not selling, just exposing the developer to the problem space

Creating qualified leads

• Thought leadership content/make yourself the domain expert
• Why buy into the thesis/idea/product you’re solving. Still not about your company, rather just the problem/solution

Considering your product

• Results and benchmarks from using your solution, technical whitepapers
• Case studies and Comparison charts

#developer marketing #api best practices #developer relations #api adoption #developer advocacy #developer advocate #api product #api evangelist #api program #developer journey