The meteoric rise of Product-Led Growth, or PLG, has transformed business within the world of technology. One sector in particular has found incredibly fertile ground, that being, API-driven companies. This is in part because API-driven companies offer an easy-to-adopt platform that is highly customizable. Top product led growth companies Twilio and Stripe are often listed as the luminaries in the API space, because of their disruptive approach and their wildly high valuations.

There’s a common misconception that product-led growth means a business doesn’t focus on sales. That’s not the case. It’s just that product-led growth layers in sales later in the customer journey. This can be a hugely effective approach, particularly when it’s combined with deep data insights to drive that growth. For API-first companies, this product-led approach is a cornerstone of success.

API providers need to observe their APIs to get meaningful data about whether and how they are consumed in practice. API observability is a form of monitoring that passively logs API traffic to an observability service. Different from traditional API monitoring, with API observability you: Monitor interactions to improve developer experience Understand how customers use your API Troubleshoot your API Observing REST APIs is well understood and supported, but not every API is a REST API.

Founding a developer-first startup isn’t quite the same as starting a regular company. When your primary focus is on creating products to sell to developers, you need to build a sales strategy around those developers’ needs. The occasional email with a ‘click here for a demo’ button just won’t cut it. Instead, it’s time to work on your content strategy. Why take our word for it?

API providers need to understand how their consumers are using their APIs. Usage metrics are essential because they tell you about API adoption, how your API is growing over time, and which endpoints are seeing more (or less) use. When you look at API usage metrics, you should be measuring the active users on your API in the sense that most closely aligns with your service.