Startup Toolkit: how to launch your product Haywire Hunter Walk | 99% Humble, 1% Brag Bothsides of the Table | 2x entrepreneur turned VC Developer APIs: Unbundling of SaaS, Intelligence as a Service and Mobile Interaction The first generation of highly successful developer APIs was about infrastructure. Communication infrastructure with Twilio, Sendgrid, payment infrastructure with Stripe, hosting / computing infrastructure with AWS. Now that these leaders are well established it’s getting more complicated for newcomers to compete with them. Now the fun takes place at the layer above the “infrastructure” one, at the application / feature level. Here are 3 trends which I think are worth following in the months / years to come. Unbundling of SaaS The approach of these startups is to sell a software experience in the form of an API instead of a packaged product. IMHO it’s an interesting approach because it’s an intermediate solution between buying a “finished” product and developing a software “in house”. Keen.Io. Intelligence as a Service I’ve already talked about it in a previous article, but I believe that more and more apps will integrate “intelligent” features leveraging big data. Mobile Interaction
The Unbundling of Traditional SaaS Products — Point Nine Land A couple of months ago I wrote an article highlighting 3 trends in the SaaS industry and one of them, “Unbundling of SaaS”, lead to some interesting discussions that I want to sum up here. What’s the unbundling of SaaS ? By “unbundling of SaaS” I refer to the increasing number of startups which are offering software packaged as an API instead of a traditional finished product. A good example is the “support” vertical with several products like supportive.io or supportify.io which “API-fied” the features of traditional support software (like Zendesk) so that you can create your own support experience without having to code everything from scratch. And an increasing number of products are unbundling more and more traditional SaaS features in different verticals (marketing, analytics, support, accounting, sales…) Check the “unbundling of SaaS” branch on this mindmap for more examples. How do they differ from traditional APIs? “Unbundling APIs” don’t necessarily target developers first. Need
Step-by-Step: Creating amazing GIFs to announce new features GIFs aren’t just for cats anymore! At Baremetrics, we use GIFs to announce and explain new features on Twitter and in Intercom. Follow along and I’ll show you, start to finish, how to make them for your own product. This isn’t new territory–other companies like Slack and Invision have been making awesome GIFs for a while now and served as inspiration for me to get into the game as well. Why GIFs? So, why use GIFs for announcing new features? In Intercom, they play automatically, which is a great way to get a user to improve your in-app message. We find that including a GIF gets us higher engagement on both Twitter and Intercom, making it a great way to draw attention to new features and better engage your users. Okay, I’m convinced. To get started, you need three things: Screenflow, Photoshop and a new or existing feature to highlight. To show you my process for these, I’ll walk you through creating an account feature announcement GIF! Getting ready to make your GIF Remove unnecessary stuff