Startups Turn To APIs to Quickly Bring New Products To Market

The rise of APIs and SDKs have greatly reduced the time it takes to launch an MVP (minimal viable product). Rather than having to develop complex technologies in-house, off the shelf solutions can simply be installed to add a feature. So for instance, for a video messaging app, it would normally take dedicated engineers eight months to develop a video recorder and player that records and plays across all devices and browsers -- and still the capabilities would be primitive. Today, however, video APIs exist as off-the-shelf solutions that can be installed in a matter of minutes.

With MVPs more quickly developed, results of whether the market is interested in the product can be quickly gleamed -- and tweaks to the product to find product-market fit even quicker. As such, a revolution of new products based on APIs is becoming the new standard for development -- one made much more efficient with these pre-existing modules of technologies.