Build a More Successful API Program with Postman’s Public API Network
APIs are the cornerstone of modern technology. Today, companies across nearly every industry are increasingly adopting API strategies in their business operations and providing endless possibilities to the end user by bridging the gaps between applications. In fact, 94% of respondents in Postman’s 2021 State of the API Report said that investment of time and resources into APIs would increase or stay the same for the next 12 months.
Reasons for adopting an API program
With 90% of developers leveraging APIs globally, more and more enterprises have adopted or are trying to adopt API business strategies with some form of an API program—whether it’s having a developer portal or a formal partnership process for API consumers. These programs are important because they can provide the following growth to your business:
- A gateway to strategic partnerships
- Additional revenue streams via upselling or paid access
- Connectivity to other applications to bring additional functionality and features to an application or service
Creating a public Postman Collection was a no-brainer for our team. Postman allows us to meet the varied skillsets of our diverse developer community while also providing an interface to interact with our API seamlessly.Travell Williams, software engineer at PayPal
Make your APIs more accessible
But what makes a good API program? Accessibility is one of the key features that should be considered for any API program. Developers often seek solutions or alternatives through APIs under time constraints with approaching deadlines. Whether your APIs are paid or free, developers want the fastest way to get to the first successful API call. This should be your most important metric when measuring the success of your APIs: the time it takes to get to that first success message gives the consumer a number of insights on the level of effort it will take to adopt an API.
The more pathways we can create for people to explore the New Relic GraphQL API, Nerdgraph, to power their applications and services, the better. When we decided to add a public GraphQL API collection on Postman, we did so because we were confident that Postman's support for developers with things like auto-completion, auto-introspection of the GraphQL schema to always make sure you're building with the latest version, and a lot more would be an invaluable experience for New Relic users—and we were absolutely right. The feedback has been fantastic. It has made the ramp to onboard to Nerdgraph even wider and more accessible.Ben Greenberg, lead developer relations engineer at New Relic
The power of public workspaces in the Postman API Network
One of the most powerful features we’ve implemented at Postman is the ability for organizations to create public workspaces for their APIs on Postman’s Public API Network, allowing developers to obtain that “time to first API call” faster. With Postman Collections serving as the standard for API testing, organizations such as Twitter and Salesforce have found huge success leveraging public workspaces in their API programs.
Tapping into Postman’s 20 million users, the Salesforce public workspace has received more than 200,000 hits and 50,000 forks because the Salesforce team utilized our Public API Network, driving additional traffic to their APIs. The Microsoft Graph team has also launched a successful public workspace with more than 100,000 users accessing the Microsoft Graph API through Postman.
Our new feature announcements always include a link to our Postman Collection, so that developers can get started quickly and seamlessly.Chloe Kaliman, senior partner engineer and developer relations at Twitter
A public workspace minimizes the steps for developers to access and work with an API—their journey is as simple as signing up for Postman, obtaining an API key, and using Postman Collections to get their first test started. With the optimum API configuration provided directly from the organization, public workspaces assist both the API provider and consumer by providing hands-on examples for the developer; this mitigates confusion and the need for API support from the organization.
Amadeus for Developers maintains a Postman Collection that allows developers to explore and use the Self-Service APIs without writing a single line of code. That reduces the onboarding process, since developers in one single place can access all the APIs without having to care about manual tasks such as adding the access token on each request or building the API requests from scratch. Also, Postman is a time-saver for day-to-day tasks in our developer relations team, since we heavily use it for support queries and building tutorialsAnna Tsolakou, developer advocate at Amadeus
To see how companies have used the Postman Public API Network to enhance their API programs, check out well-built public workspaces New Relic, Amadeus, and PayPal.
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