[fjp]

I'm at a company with a self-serve B2B API platform.

Our customers mostly build their own PaaS offerings on top of our API, which has some really positive effects I have observed.

1. Stickiness & seriousness of customer. When we land a big customer who is going to swap out competitor APIs from their platform and use ours, this customer is clearly very serious about building & growing with us, as the approval to rewrite huge amounts of core platform functionality to use our APIs is not made lightly, and is almost always made by a technical C-level person. The building phase often results in very close relationships with their developers. Their needs and demands help drive our roadmap, but with the understanding that we're not special-casing anything for them. If they need a feature, we're going to take the time to build it so everyone can use it.

2. Being API-first means satisfying the developer, which lends itself to focusing on building ergonomic software. If updating some configuration takes 2 seconds instead of 200ms, no developer is going to prioritize switching to our API when they need to make a 50k of those update requests regularly. If something takes two commands on our API instead of one on our competitors API, it better be damn clear what value that extra command is providing... etc etc etc.