APIs ensure everything in the digital world can team up, share ideas, and create awesome new stuff. They’re the reason your favorite apps can work together seamlessly, making your tech life way smoother and more fun. This is one of many reasons we think API education is so important, and it’s the driving purpose behind The Cat API.
For most companies revenue and API adoption would be the most important indicators of performance for an API. However, there are other ways of looking at the success. For the Cat API we’ve always wanted to be a resource for students and developers to learn about APIs and how they work. Adoption of the Cat API would suggest its been quite successful with 1000’s of signups each month, and from that standpoint it has, however, we have tracked so many additional indicators of success.
The Cat API: A 13-Year Journey to spread cats across the web
13 years ago, Aden Forshaw, the founder of That API Company started The Cat API as a weekend hack with a bit of PHP, some cheap web hosting, and pictures he took himself. Back then Aden was a co-founder of another company, and was working to solve a problem the company was having. He released his hack, The Cat API, and organically people started discovering it – the internet loves cats – who’d have thought? They love them so much in fact, that even when Aden disabled signups on the fronted, people found a work around to signup and use the product.
The Cat API is straightforward: a free signup grants you an API key, offering 10,000 monthly requests, complimentary code samples, tutorials, and entry to a vibrant Discord community where we provide direct support. Initially, it was a platform for fetching random cat pictures and allowing users to upload their own. The early technology we employed to discern if an image featured a cat and was deemed “safe” could be a topic for a separate article in itself!
Unexpected Educational Impact:
The primary application for both the Cat and Dog API is education. We receive sign-ups from coding camps, college courses, and curious junior developers eager to broaden their skill sets and enrich their portfolios with exciting projects. These APIs serve as engaging and straightforward tools for learning how to use an API and constructing applications.
We’ve come across an incredible array of projects that make use of our APIs. They’re showcased on various platforms like LinkedIn, personal blogs (check out this example), GitHub, Youtube, and some even made their way onto Google Play and The App Store. Last year, we did a quick post highlighting some of our favorite discoveries, and with the influx of new projects since then, it looks like we’re overdue for a follow-up!
The gratitude expressed by our API users stands out as the most uplifting acknowledgment and a clear testament to the success of our product. An element we find interesting are the different ways in which the product is being used, from building applications and slack bots, to teaching technical writing courses, and using the API to prove skills needed to land a job, with the majority of these use cases only really being discovered through the voluntary feedback we’ve had from users.
Business Standpoint:
An unexpected advantage from the Cat API is the SEO opportunities that have emerged through our clients’ projects. As their creations are shared on diverse platforms like GitHub, personal blogs, and LinkedIn, we’ve witnessed a substantial surge in backlinks, significantly bolstering our domain authority within the niche. This unexpected yet welcome side effect has not only expanded our online presence but also solidified our standing as a go-to authority in the field.
Our Cat API community, cultivated over the years, has recently evolved with the addition of a Discord Group, as detailed in a recent blog post. Within this group, we actively engage by addressing API-related queries, offering troubleshooting support, organizing competitions, announcing new releases, and utilizing it as a testing ground for our latest products. This community has proven to be an invaluable resource for finding talented developers whenever we’re on the lookout to expand our team.
We have also used The Cat API as a valuable testing ground for other products we’ve developed. Most recently TheAuthAPI, which is now powering the Dog and Cat APIs. The Auth API allows us to securely provision, distribute, verify and get deep usage analytics on tens of thousands of developer apps accessing the APIs each month.
The inherent virality linked to cats significantly contributed to the API product’s popularity, providing us with a platform to further capitalize on its success. Also, the Cat API’s role as an educational resource has ensured that successive generations of developers are well-acquainted with our products and services. Additionally, a recent Net Promoter Score revealed that 85% of our users are inclined to recommend The Cat API, signaling an expected increase in user numbers through word of mouth.
Conclusion:
We had no way of knowing when we created The Cat API 13 years ago that it would have the impact it has, and really for the first decade of its existence we just thought of it as this free fun tool we created, and hadn’t anticipated any of the added benefits we’ve seen as a company. For us it has served as a good reminder to look beyond the traditional metrics often considered when measuring success.
