As the mobile platform continues to grow, tech companies are relying on application programming interfaces — APIs — more than ever. While these APIs certainly can add functionality to an app or program, they can also cause problems for developers — and that’s exactly where a new Seattle startup wants to help out.
APImetrics co-founders Nick Denny and David O’Neill — both originally from the U.K. — have spent the past few years building interactive mobile applications and solutions. During this time, they became interested in the how APIs were impacting the apps they were building.
The idea for APImetrics was born when a faulty LinkedIn API caused issues with a client. Soon later, Denny and O’Neill realized that they had stumbled upon a problem that needed fixing.
“Now that the world has become dependent on interconnected services built on APIs, people need a tool to both tell them how well these services are working and warn them when something goes wrong,” O’Neill said. “We’ve created that tool.”
We caught up with O’Neill for this installment of Startup Spotlight, a regular GeekWire feature.
Explain what you do so our parents can understand it: The internet is built on pipes connected by things we call APIs. We provide a tool that measures the amount of stuff flowing through the pipes — how fast it is flowing and how many leaks there are.
Inspiration hit us when: A client blamed us for an outage involving LinkedIn’s APIs. When we investigated, we realized that our assumptions about how fast and reliable the API was were completely wrong. We decided to build some more tests to understand what sort of impact this could be having on our other services. Soon thereafter, one of our clients saw the prototype and asked for us to do it for their APIs. That’s when we realized that we had a business.
VC, Angel or Bootstrap: Bootstrap, initially, and we’re raising Angel funds at the moment.
We wanted to be sure that we had a business before we moved forward. Now that we both have customer validation and reputable partners, like Kirkland-based Radius Inc., we’ve decided it’s time to grow faster.
Our ‘secret sauce’ is: The way we handle security — our method allows tests to run on a repeating basis even if the API calls need security tokens.
The smartest move we’ve made so far: Getting a V1 product up and running quickly, which was gathering data on major APIs. We’ve now got a database of API performance going back over a year, which is more than 60GB in size and covers over 3.5 million API calls! We’re planning to leverage this data in interesting ways as we move forward.
The biggest mistake we’ve made so far: Not thinking big enough and growing faster. We’re over that now.
Would you rather have Gates, Jobs, Zuckerberg or Bezos in your corner: A few years ago we’d have said Gates. Now it’s Bezos – without Jeff Bezos and Amazon, a lot of the technology we monitor wouldn’t exist.
Our world domination strategy starts when: It’s already started. In the last five years the tech ecosystem has gone from a few dozen public APIs to over 10,000 being used by developers all over the world. People need to know what those APIs are doing. That’s where we come in.
Rivals should fear us because: Data and automation around the data is essential to any business in this space and we’ve simply got more data to mine and build our intelligence on than anybody else.
We are truly unique because: Data. It’s all about the data. And our solution is designed to appeal to technical and non-technical people alike.
The biggest hurdle we’ve overcome is: Getting a simple UX built to make it as easy as possible to build API calls that even somebody with limited technical skills can use.
What’s the one piece of advice you’d give to other entrepreneurs just starting out: Get your MVP built as quickly as possible.
