Josh Twist - the founder of Zuplo, an API Management tool aiming to give you a Stripe-like API experience out-the-box.

The API Management tools space is pretty interesting, so this week we're covering the industry and Zuplo's place within it - pulling from Josh's appearance on Scaling DevTools.

API Management is growing rapidly

Valued at $2.1 billion in 2021 and projected to reach $41.5 billion by 2031 according to Allied Market Research.

Selected API Management players

• ​Apigee (part of GCP, acquired for $625m)
• ​Kong (raised $169m)
• ​Mulesoft (part of Salesforce, acquired for $6.5b)
• ​Amazon API Gateway
• ​Gravitee (raised $30m)
• ​Azure API Management
• ​Tyk (raised $35m)

What is an API Management tool?

• Developer portal - the bridge between API consumers & providers. It is where users can gain access, get API keys and educate themselves on the APIs.
• API gateway - the security guard. It checks permissions on traffic. It keeps track of and enforces any policy limits on the amount or types of traffic.

What problems are API Management tools solving?

• Inconsistent APIs with inconsistent documentation across big organisations
• Authentication & authorization - an API gateway can determine who is sending the traffic and ensure they have the relevant permissions before routing it to the called service.
• Audit - because all traffic passes through the gateway, it creates an audit trail for monitoring errors, performance and security incidents.
• Threat protection - protect your APIs from spikes/DDoS attacks​
• Integration - since everything is in one place, its easy to integrate with other applications
• DevTool startups that want to go from API to product fast (me!)

Downsides of API Management tools

• Extra hop for network requests
• Single point of failure for your services
• Single point of attack for hackers
• Setup and ongoing costs

How Zuplo is breaking into the API Management market

• Founded in 2021 in Seattle
• Raised $4.5m (according to Pitchbook)
• Investors include Boldstart and the founders of Snyk and Auth0​

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Zuplo SWOT

Strengths:

• Experienced and very competent team. CEO Josh was previously building API tools at Azure. CTO Nathan was building tools at Auth0, Salesforce & Microsoft.
• A clear vision of the problem from Josh's experience at Azure. Kong has had a lot of success with a similar strategy: Gartner note that Kong's customers perceive "competing offerings as complex and heavy-duty".
• Great product & product leadership (I have used Zuplo, and it was a very positive experience).
• Very welcoming and helpful community/team - when I joined, I got a big welcome and lots of help.
• Everything in the Zuplo workflow can be defined within git.
• ​Partnership with Supabase​

Weaknesses

• Are SMBs willing to budget time and resources for API management?
• The industry is largely dominated by big players that leverage complementary services and existing relationships.
• Gartner's definition of a Full Lifecycle API Management tool is quite large and will take significant investment to build. This has been further accelerated by consolidation with, for example, Kong's acquisition of Insomnia (an API debugging/testing tool).
• Some larger competitors offer industry-specific services such as the Apigee Open Banking APIx​

Opportunities

• Big players largely focus on enterprise-level API management without focusing on the SMB market.
• The above also means API Management is expensive, so inaccessible to SMBs.
• The big tools are hard to learn and fit into a developer's workflow.
• AI - recent trends may lead to opportunities for disruption. Zuplo have already released some articles on how to ship a ChatGPT plugin with Zuplo

Threats

• Fully Open Source tools could position themselves effectively against less Open Sourced tools.
• Finding enough users looking for API Management tools or being willing to change
• For simple use cases, do-it-yourself can be a threat. Plus doing nothing.

How Zuplo is finding users

People will adopt API management tools only at certain times of big change.

Knowing this, there are two obvious approaches to acquiring users:

1. Find them at the right time (e.g. a cold email). This relies on hard work and some luck. Josh compares it to "blindfolding yourself and shooting arrows into the woods".
2. Build a strong brand so you are top of mind when they make changes. But this is hard for startups with short time horizons and limited budgets.

But, Josh shared a third approach that Zuplo has favoured - laying trip wires.

Examples of laying tripwires are sponsoring rate-limiting libraries and mentioning Zuplo. This is a trip wire because if someone is using a rate-limiting library, there's a strong chance they're currently in the process of assessing API Management tools (or building their own).

Josh also invests time in making great API-related content. Some videos have thousands of views on niche API topics, e.g. API Key authentication best practices has 7,900 views.

In the full interview, we also talk about other strategies, such as Zuplo's partnership with Supabase - that's how I found them - here's the receipt.

More snippets of Josh's thinking

• Don't be afraid to kill features that aren't important
• Engineers building it themselves is probably my biggest competitor
• Focus on improving your key features. "Take lots of 1% wins over a shot at a 50% win" - Josh's old boss at Meta.
• Two turkeys don't make an eagle - partnerships between two small companies probably don't make sense.
• Code is cheap; infrastructure is not. Code can easily be rewritten, whereas infra has a habit of sticking around.
• What would an 11-star API management experience look like? Via Airbnb founder Brian Chesky

Thanks so much to Josh and Zuplo for sharing so many lessons.

Other resources I enjoyed this week

• ​Successful KPIs in DevRel by Harpreet Sahota ​
• ​SEO tips to improve organic traffic in under 15 minutes​
• ​Direct Sales for Bootstrapped Businesses​
• ​CTO panel discussion - a day in the life​
• ​The many roles of a CTO

Thanks for making it this far - what did you think of the new format?