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> Many companies and tools are built on and rely on this API for their product & daily operations. Hopefully not their entire product. The first rule is don't
by nkozyra 4y ago
> Many companies and tools are built on and rely on this API for their product & daily operations.
Hopefully not their entire product. The first rule is don't build your company on the back of another, but I think the most important part is that if you do use another company, make sure you're fine if they disappear one day.
The last time Facebook made major changes (ostensibly as a response to the Cambridge Analytica stuff, but that was just an excuse) a bunch of people got burned.
My company did too but we always kept ourselves in a place where if it vanished we'd be - at worst - inconvenienced.
This approach came because early on I was burned by Twitter changes that were more impactful.
Most recent Twitter changes prove that even paying for access provides no guarantees.
- i386 4y agothis is easy to say as a comment on HN but unavoidable to a large degree for businesses in the marketing and social media space.
- nkozyra 4y agoWell these are riskier businesses to start for this reason. I did cage it by saying make sure your whole company doesn't collapse if one API gets shut down.
- LadyCailin 4y agoPart of these types of businesses is accepting that risk then, and knowing that despite doing everything right, your business may be unceremoniously shut down because of some PM’s whim. I wouldn’t want to be in that kind of position, but I guess more power to those that do.
- Waterluvian 4y agoYeah, I don’t think it’s right to say “never try.” It’s more, “never lose sight at how brittle your business is. The other company owes you nothing if it’s not written in a contract. You aren’t a victim when it breaks your business.”
- uoaei 4y agoThat is a risk of doing business. If they don't anticipate this kind of thing and build contingencies around it, they are simply bad at business. "Free market for thee, but not for me" is not a strong argument in any context.
- i386 4y agoRisk without risk mitigation is just bad business.
- BoorishBears 4y agoYou don't understand risk or business if you think a good business mitigates all risks, or even its largest risks. The biggest risk for a medical company is harming patients. Do they just throw up their hands and stop being a medical company? The biggest risk for social media firm is the social media they serve through goes down. So what, they throw up their hands and stop being a social media firm?
- dylan604 4y agoyou play in the mud, you're going to get dirty. if your entire marketing company focuses on social, then why that doesn't fall into "all eggs, one basket" concept is beyond me. Sure, it's much easier to get a company rolling when you have to do nothing but use the product of someone else as the core of your business, but why that's not an immediate red flag to someone in that position is something i just don't understand.
- BoorishBears 4y agoThis has got to be the most platitudes I've ever seen stuffed in a single comment... I almost want to say it's satire. But yeah, there's a lot of real valuable businesses built on existential risks. We're currently getting a reminder that our banking system puts all its eggs in the idea not too many people will ask for money at the same time. Optimizing for black swan events is just generally not good business.
- lozenge 4y agoMarketers and customer service need to be able to manage their social accounts, that's a product space which inherently relies on API access to those website. Maybe you wouldn't want to build that product, but clearly somebody will.
- gloosx 4y agoCould you just use API's IG app uses itself to manage accounts? And scrape the data you need with GET requests behind a proxy list? Before any public APIs everybody was doing it, is it any hard these days to fall back to regular user API instead of some fancy regulated 'developer-only' API?
- altdataseller 4y agoIts all rate limited. Inpossible to scrape
- gloosx 4y ago
- omk 4y agoTrue. The Twitpic story comes to mind.
- princevegeta89 4y agoSorry but APIs aren't meant to be broken at anytime. That's what they are for. That is the unwritten part of the so called contracts/agreements. I do not understand how the idea of not building a company on the back of another is possible. We rely on other companies for deployments, hosting, reporting, monitoring, payments, billing and security etc. Some may be less critical than others but how can you avoid your reliance on other companies at all?
- kaetemi 4y agoEnsure you have a backup supplier that you can switch to.
- j45 4y agoVery true. It’s a small but very helpful act of looking out for your future self to generalize access to APIs or multiple providers in your codebase via your own concept of accessing a list of service providers can be easily swapped out or added to.
- brookst 4y agoIt’s about diversification. Don’t build a company entirely dependent on a single other company that can’t be replaced. If your payment provider stops offering payments, it’s annoying but not existential. If your whole business is reselling a single artist and they die or switch to a different gallery, you’re done.
- marpstar 4y agoGP's advice generally applies when talking about integrating with a third party API to provide data as a "input" to your business. The things you listed (deployment, hosting, monitoring...) are all after-the-fact concerns, and are generally interchangeable in a way that the API output schema (or systems uptime) for a particular service is not.
- WA 4y agoI have the same attitude and it is severely restricting my creativity. While I think "don’t build on other peoples APIs", others just launched many tools built on top of Instagram, OpenAI, Twitter and whatnot. By now I feel like it’s better to build on top of an API, be aware that it might go away one day but make money while it lasts, which can be many years.
- paulddraper 4y ago> The first rule is don't build your company on the back of another What's the over-under on # of companies built on AWS?