APIs All the Way Down

Agora is an API-first business, which means it grows in two ways:

Compounding Growth Loops for API-First Companies

A common API-First company’s North Star metric is developer adoption, and the number of developers in an API-ecosystem tends to compound naturally in four growth loops that reinforce each other .

1. The Developer Experience (DX) Loop: Developers who explore (and eventually thrive) with the API will bu... See more

While you might not think of them this way, some of the biggest companies of the past few decades originated from easily-implemented APIs that gave their users heightened power, efficiency or accessibility. API-first companies like Stripe, Twilio & Okta either created new markets or dramatically grew existing categories.

When an industry, technology, or product area feels mature and "settled" (like online payments in 2009 with PayPal and many others, or email clients today), it doesn't mean that its a bad space to build something new. In fact, such inertia or perceived product maturity may be signs of a huge opportunity. In these cases, you should build from the id... See more

- API-driven architecture is maturing as a paradigm and enabling more communication between applications across value chains.

The point is context — by abstracting a core function and delivering it in situ, value is created. That is achieved by removing friction or utilizing unique data. Shopify is the canonical example. In recent years, the e-commerce platform has moved beyond integrating Stripe to offer a range of embedded products, including merchant lending that uses ... See more