I just joined this group but I think this could be an interesting discussion from Indie Hackers (not written be me): “I’ve been thinking recently about API businesses. This movement seems to have started with some companies many Indie Hackers will know well, such as Stripe & Twilio. I’m seeing it more and more: • Plaid - API for open banking • Duffell - API for travel • Pay It Off - API for student loads • Alpaca - API for open banking I wanted to understand what makes these markets suitable for APIs as a business. Thinking out loud here... 1. There seems to be a bias towards finance/fintech 2. The underlying supplier seems large, slow, complicated incumbents (banks, airlines, etc) 3. Some of these are regulated industries Any other things you noticed about these API companies? What makes them good businesses? Has anyone else seen any other interesting API businesses?”

@Tem (optemization.com) - Hey could you remove all the attached images? It makes scrolling through the channel a bit of a hassle 🙂

Took me a few years to bother to look; but there is a setting for it under Preferences - Messages & Media - and scroll down Well I think its those; there are a bunch of "preview" settings in there

@karki hit /collapse command as a temporary solution

@Tem (optemization.com) I can speak on API for banking/paying/subscriptions — I built a company around the time Stripe came out (more or less doing the same thing) but did not take it to market as we used it internally in another company. The complexities inside banking/ACH/creditcards is insane. Honestly, it’s the definition of insanity. Banks and cards are very difficult to work with because their tech is absolute shit. So APIs that make that easy… very valuable. (Happy to share more of my experience there, just DM me) I don’t think the finance/fintech note is exclusive or even a bias. It’s more business as a whole. Consumers rather use interfaces, so I would be comfortable drawing the line of a bias towards businesses. API tools are all about ease of use: providing a better UX than dealing with the terrible tech underneath it. Think of API’s as more access to information than a programming interface. If you are intereseted in building an API as a business I have a friend, Travis, that would love to chat more building the company Saasify.sh who has a lot of experience in this topic.

@karki — Agreed; attachments removed. @Ian Rumac Agreed; this is off-topic for our community, but would be just fine in #random. (I say this for anyone reading, to help calibrate their filter of on/off-topic-ness)

@Ian Rumac @Ivan Reese got it! thank you for the tip on content relevance 🙌 @karki i actually don’t see the attachments myself! i usually remove them…

APIs might be the purest form of avoiding Schlep Blindness (http://www.paulgraham.com/schlep.html), in the sense that you turn a schelp into something that can be abstracted away through an API call :)

@Tem (optemization.com) - looks like Ivan removed them before you got to it! 😄 (He’s an admin so he can do such stuff)