The BigDoor Blog | May, 2010

The early API instructor.

While I may be a bit biased, I happen to think that my Mother is one of the most amazing people who has ever walked the face of this earth.  She’s also a bit technically challenged (my 13 year old daughter regularly teaches her “new” things about Grandma’s iPhone).  Yet despite some periodic technical ineptitude, it’s safe to say that everything I ever needed to know about an API I learned from her at a very young age.

1. Hurry up. Mom used to tell me, “You are slower than the seven year itch.”  I never quite understood what that meant, but I knew that her saying it needed to result in me significantly increasing my speed.
   Modern day API application: A slow API is a crappy API.  Make sure it goes fast (and then make it go faster).
2. Keep track of where you put stuff. If I lost track of my toys, they were quickly rounded up and placed in the “Saturday Box.”  This meant that I couldn’t play with them again until Saturday.  Amazing how the dozens of other toys in the house would suddenly become very uninteresting as I sat on the edge of the Saturday Box and counted down the days until I could again play with that once forgotten toy.
   Modern day API application: Document your API.  If the code is written but not documented, it doesn’t exist.
3. Be consistent. When Mom counted to three, she didn’t stutter and didn’t slow down.  If she told me she was going to spank me when she got to “3” – you can bet your ass that mine was going to be sore.
   Modern day API application: Do what you say and say what you do.  Anything else leaves external developers scratching their heads and wondering if you are really serious or not.
4. Don’t talk to strangers. Mom warned of this so often that by the time I headed off to first grade I assumed everyone who drove a windowless van was loaded with candy and missing a puppy.
   Modern day API application: Because our API relies heavily on security, every PUT, POST or DELETE call has to be securely signed (and you can decide if you want your GETs to be signed as well).
5. Communicate clearly. Mom used to say, “Use your words.”  Apparently she thought that my series of whines and grunts wasn’t going to be an effective communication strategy for me as I got older.
   Modern day API application: Using consistent and industry standard languages, formats, response codes and protocols is critical for a friendly API.
6. Play nice with others. Mom required that I stop doing things like hair pulling and biting at a fairly young age.
   Modern day API application: Make sure you can plug into other systems and apps without causing harm.
7. Always make your bed. Mom was a stickler for neatness, and an unmade bed represented all that was evil in the world.  She is the only person I’ve ever known that makes her bed before checking out of a hotel.
   Modern day API application: An API needs to be neat and tidy, and the documentation needs to match.
8. Don’t bring more than you need. As a kid we had a little, green, Datsun station wagon – with little being the key word.  I would show up ready for a trip with an armful of toys, and Mom would dutifully go through each one and make me defend my reason for bringing it.  The two or three toys that made the cut would fit easily in our little car.
   Modern day API application: Adding features for the sake of features just clutters your API and makes it more difficult for external developers to understand.  Reduce the clutter, and perfect those features that you can make a real case for.
9. Take naps. Mom had a strongly held belief that naps could cure just about anything that ailed me.  She was generally right.
   Modern day API application: Be RESTful.
10. Go outside and play. Mom’s rule was that the TV was never on if it was light outside.  “Play a game”, “have fun”, “go outside” – these were common refrains in our household.
    Modern day API application: Just about everything you need to know about your business resides outside of your walls.  An API is a great way to “get outside” and as for playing games and having fun – that’s the entire purpose of our API.

If you’ve been following this blog you may have noticed that we’ve gone completely silent for going on five months now.  The reason for our silence is because we’ve been heads down on some very interesting things, but it’s time we pick our heads back up and start telling everyone what we’ve been up to.

There is a wonderful axiom among startup companies that “no business plan survives its first encounter with a customer.”  Ours was no different.  We started BigDoor with a very big vision and a core thesis – and while those remain our guiding principles, we’ve significantly shifted our business model, our product and our strategy.  The Lean Startup folks (lead by the incredibly bright and talented Eric Ries) call this the “pivot”, but we’ve always referred to it much less eloquently as the “startup two-step”.  Call it what you will, but it is all part of the process a startup goes through in finding the right strategy, the right customers, the right technology and the right business model.

The “two-step” is a critical part of the “Lamplighter” methodology that Jeff and I have been utilizing for the last dozen years.  Our Lamplighter Theory states that that as a startup we need a large and guiding thesis that tells us where we want to go, yet it recognizes that we really have no idea what the incremental steps will be to get there.  I envision Lamplighter as if I’m standing on a hilltop and off in the distance is another hilltop that is drenched with sunlight, flowers, rainbows, butterflies and unicorns – yet between us is a dark valley filled with bogs, moats, thorns and other scary things.  The sundrenched hilltop in the distance represents our business when it is profitable and scaling – the valley in between holds the pitfalls that kill most young companies.

There is undoubtedly at least one path through the dark valley, but the paths are obscured and unknown from our current perspective.  To get to the fluffy, magic hilltop in the distance we must light a lamppost which will allow us to see just far enough into the dark valley to get to the next lamppost, which we will light when we get there and so on until we ultimately make our way through what seemed like an impossible barrier.  Looking back at the lit lampposts that lit our path will show the route we ultimately took may have been a bit windy with a fair amount of severe turns, but thinking one knows the path intuitively through the dangerous and dark canyon will most often lead to ruin.  The light from the lampposts are provided by many sources, but often the most important source is from current and potential customers.  Speaking with and listening to our potential customers is something we love to do, and we want to say a huge thank you to each of you who have helped enlighten us so far.

So it was in keeping with our Lamplighter methodology that we decided to take a severe turn last year.  We did the “two-step”, took a sharp left turn and began developing a platform that helps publishers build loyalty programs and game-like mechanics into their site or app through points, badges, levels, virtual currency and virtual goods.  We quietly launched with our first customer in March, and currently have an additional 18 companies that are in the process of implementing our platform.

We predict that by 2012 half of all sites and apps will employ some form of game mechanics or virtual economy components.  We are working to build a platform that is as powerful as it is extensible in order to help make this prediction a reality.