From Vision to Venture Ep. 04: Kin Lane, API Evangelist
In this engaging conversation, Derric Gilling, CEO of Moesif, and Kin Lane, API Evangelist, explore the challenges and opportunities of API monetization and productization in today’s enterprise world. Kin shares insights on rising API costs, the shift toward efficiency, and the balance between openness and control—especially in an AI-driven landscape.
With a no-nonsense take on API fundamentals, he emphasizes that while technology evolves, strong governance, analytics, and business alignment remain key. Whether you’re scaling an API program or refining your strategy, this discussion is packed with practical insights you won’t want to miss.
Listen to the episode on SoundCloud, Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can also watch the video on our YouTube Channel.
Table of Contents
- 00:00 Introduction
- 00:34 Productizing and Monetizing APIs in Enterprise Environments
- 04:50 How To Drive Efficiency
- 07:42 Value Exchange Vs. Monetization
- 11:45 Key Challenges Faced When Deploying A New Public API
- 16:17 AIs Impact With Monetization And Closed API Programs
- 19:20 Current Day API Product Managers
- 20:52 What Is Next With APIs
- 24:55 Closing Thoughts
Introduction
Derric Gilling - Welcome Kin, it’s really great to have you here, from the API Evangelist. Today, we’re gonna be speaking on how to best productize and monetize APIs, especially in a large enterprise settings.
Productizing and Monetizing APIs in Enterprise Environments
Derric - Just jumping into things, what does it mean to productize and monetize APIs? And why is it growing traction within enterprise environments?
Kin Lane - Well, I mean, folks, you gotta justify your spend. I mean, first and foremost, APIs cost money. I think the last research bit I did, you know, it costs 50 grand to stand up an API and sustain and maintain it, you’re spending money. And then secondarily, we all need to make money. So you’ve gotta be able to, all right, what resources are we making available here? And how are we gonna not give away the farm, especially in an AI world and just give away all of our digital resources? I think that’s one of the biggest misconceptions people have about public or, you know, externally available HTTP APIs, they’re gonna give away something. And so that monetization is really just about getting a handle on your digital resources and understand, you know, how they’re being applied.
Derric - Makes sense. And definitely, you know, as we’re looking at the cost of deploying those APIs and standing those up, has anything changed, you know, from APIs been around since, you know, back in the enterprise service bus and the like, but why is it such a topic now?
Kin - Yeah, you know, interestingly, you know, my Amazon bill has gone up. It has not gone down since 2010. I’ve been running APIs ever since, you know, the shift, I mean, and I’m clearly not an enterprise operations, but just, you know, relating it here is, you know, with, you know, regular instances and VMs to a more containerized and or serverless approach, I kind of leaned heavily into the serverless, but I’m coming back to a kind of common, a more basic virtualization ‘cause my resource management and what I’m having to do hasn’t changed a lot to be honest, and my bill has gotten worse. So, you know, I’m really trying to figure out how to get back to basics. And I know a lot of enterprises that I work with, they’re, you know, they’re questioning some of the more spendier parts of their rollouts that they’ve done around other types of APIs, GraphQL, Kafka, other things that may have not have achieved exactly what they needed, and then the sprawl, the API sprawl and figure out, you know, how are we gonna, you know, pay for all this and how we’re gonna make money here. So not as a lot has changed. It’s gotten more expensive and more complicated and more sprawling, but I wouldn’t say the technical bits have really changed all that much.
Derric - So it sounds like driving a lot of efficiency, trying to get more out of those investments into these API programs, right?
Kin - Yeah, yeah, I mean, think of FinOps, you know, and how that’s kind of spun up as far as financial, you know, understanding your financial operations. So think of that in terms of APIs from just, you know, what’s our cloud bill, what’s our spend, what does it cost to run these things? But you can’t just pinch pennies and you can’t just, you know, impose austerity on API operations. You’ve got to understand and make sense of that and actually try to figure out, well, what do we have here that’s worth keeping? What digital resources, what capabilities do we have here that are needed and that are useful? And maybe we’re not squeezing as much revenue out of them as we could if we just kind of carved them up in new and interesting ways, or we paid attention to different groups of users in different ways. We looked at things regionally. I just think there’s a lot of ways we can, A, I mean, my business is helping you survey and assess that sprawling API landscape that you have, but you’re really in the business of, all right, you know, once we, as we’re surveying this, what’s here, what’s valuable, what’s useful? How are people using it currently? And then how do we incrementally maybe start optimizing and generating new revenue from those digital resources?
How To Drive Efficiency
Derric - So it sounds like a lot of analytics and trying to understand the sprawl and consumption of these different APIs, but from there, then how do someone actually execute on that strategy? What are the key things that you typically see to try and drive efficiency through these different API programs?
Kin - I mean, I’ve talked to quite a few folks. I talked to people in the public sector, as well as the private sector, just taking existing APIs, whether they’re REST, whether they’re SOAP, whatever they can, trying to expose them as just simple REST, really focusing there, ‘cause that’s the cheapest, that’s the easiest, that’s what teams know, but they’re just taking individual resources and assessing, well, who’s using them, getting an awareness of who’s using them, what are they doing with it, and making sure that they have the analytics in place to kind of understand that and observe and see that, and then start really kind of inventorying those digital resources. So each path, you have images or videos or accounts or whatever those slash digital resources you have, and then understanding how people are using them. Hopefully they have existing customers. If they don’t, deprecate them, they should go away, they’re there. Who’s using them? And then start thinking about, well, how do these work as bundles with other resources? In government, I’m seeing a lot of groups who are like, how do we join forces with other departments, other agencies, ‘cause we know our resources, we know their resources, different applications spread across those, how do we optimize and build better business models and value exchange at those levels? So really it’s pretty fundamental. It’s just basic API paths and operations, tagging and organizing those, pulling the data on who’s using them, pulling reports on that to try to understand what’s happening, and then getting all the business and engineering stakeholders together to talk about, all right, what’s next, what’s sensible, where can we start maybe making, changing up our plans a little bit, changing up our rate limits, using fewer resources. I mean, that’s the interesting thing. I know you guys are analytics and very monetization product focus, but this is an intersection of technical and business. So like rate limits is a common conversation in the technical side, but rate limits feed into your business plan and your usage and what this costs and what people are paying for. And so you should really understand that technical details, but then put them on the table with the business details and then have a conversation with the human beings who reflect both sides of that coin as well.
Value Exchange Vs. Monetization
Derric - I really like this term value exchange around these APIs, especially as we try and drive efficiency through these businesses. Is that the same as monetization or when does it make sense to monetize and if it’s not monetization, what is value exchange?
Kin - I mean, that’s all part of that understanding your consumer. And I would say even having a conversation is it’s pretty identical right up to the point where maybe the credit card doesn’t get charged. You know, you’re still metering, measuring, understanding your consumers. You’re still invoicing them and saying, “Hey, here’s how much of this resource you use,” department C or, you know, West Coast group. And here’s those resources that we maintain, the ones that cost us 50 grand per resource to stand up and you’re using them, you know? And let’s have a conversation about that on a regular basis because you’re a producer or I’m a producer, you’re a consumer and we’re exchanging value. There’s gotta be reciprocity here. So you either gotta be paying and, you know, or it’s gotta be justified that, “Hey, we’re incurring these costs and you’re using them.” And then there’s gotta be some other value exchange or something, you know? So it’s just really, a lot of times, I’ve come across government agencies. One was in the Department of Commerce and they said, “Well, we’ve got,” you know, they were talking at a panel. We’re doing these kind of round table sessions as part of the General Services Administration and a whole bunch of different agencies came in. So Commerce is up there on the panel, I’m on the panel, we’re talking and they said, “Well, we’ve got like this API, it’s got like five users, but it’s quite a bit of traffic on it. It’s, you know, it’s a useful resource, but you know, it’s just never really exploded into the thing we thought it was gonna be. And so we’re probably gonna figure out how to wind that down, you know, and move on to something else.” And then a hand went up in the audience and person goes, “Well, you know, I’m with NOAA, the National Oceanic Administration, and we’re one of those users and you’re totally critical to like six different groups I know who are doing research. And if you shut it down, it’s gonna be a real big problem for a bunch of projects we have going on. So can we maybe talk about that?” And so what I see is a lot of things like that happening over and over and over where groups just don’t talk, these are digital, we don’t have a handle on who’s using it, and we don’t have a plan, a business plan in place. We don’t have any monetization strategy. It’s just as simple as that.
Derric - That’s a really interesting point where you have an API, it’s used by only very handful or small group, a number of people, but maybe there is a lot of value being delivered to those APIs or, you know, one of those users happens to be, you know, one of the largest business units or customers.
Kin - Yeah, it’s important. And I think we get, there’s a kind of a sickness that creeps in, you know, around scale sometimes that everything’s gotta be big and massive. And unfortunately, a lot of the promise around public APIs was that you kind of build it, they will come mentality where, you know, you put out a pretty basic resource that costs you $50,000 to stand up, but it’s useful to 15 people who, you know, will pay anywhere from 1,000 to 2,000 a month for those resources or something, you know, and then maybe you can crack that open, find some new interesting ones. You know, there’s a lot of opportunities there without going big, you know, not everything’s gotta be big and there’s a lot of value in the cracks.
Key Challenges Faced When Deploying A New Public API
Derric - Yeah, we’re starting to see that as well, you know, starting smaller with a smaller group of design partners to help really iterate quickly on that API strategy versus a big marketing launch and the days of 2021 and spending lots of money on that type of stuff, you know, these days it is much more important to drive efficiency even through these new initiatives. But, you know, as someone who’s, you know, sending up a new API and trying to externalize that, you know, what are some of the key challenges that you see and, you know, what are folks doing today to address that versus even a couple of years ago?
Kin - Well, I mean, I don’t wanna be a downer on it, but I’m seeing a lot of people kind of closing up and tightening up their portals. And because there’s a lot of, there was already a lot of fear. I remember Pinterest, when Pinterest first was kind of talking to people on the forum about launching an API. They’re like, oh, we wanna do this thoughtfully. We don’t wanna like make the same mistakes as Twitter. So this is like, what, 2017 or 18, I forget when they launched. So there’s always been a lot of anxiety around public APIs and how do you launch it? How do you support it? How do you do it right? But look at like Twitter and Reddit and anybody else who’s got a valuable resource right now, what’s happened to it because of kind of the appetite around AI consumption. It’s kind of scary to have your valuable resource out there, even if you do have a portal and a login and keys and analytics in place, but you gotta have a pretty tight business plan and plan on the front end of that. And I’m not just thinking, saying like well thought out initially, like you need to be well down this road and have some experience and be playing around with what works and doesn’t work and building up the muscles on your team to understand that design of your API, that design of your business plan, know your audience, know your customer and be able to really iterate before you’re gonna have, I think, a solid defensive strategy in an AI era that’s so volatile and so crazy. So honestly, I think more people are worried about having public APIs, but that doesn’t mean they’re going away. They’re just kind of going shadowy and darker and people are needing like most of to like make sense of this and understand it. So it’s gonna kind of go back to that, I think that partner dimension where it’s like other public APIs, but we only tell you about it if you talk to us and we know you and we trust you, which just, you still need to keep your public portal, your public strategy. You need to have solid security on the front end of that. But like I said, your security, your rate limits, the technical details give way to the business, part, the metrics, the dashboards, the plans, the revenue, the costs, the billing, the invoicing, all of that stuff in there. It’s just as important as security and DDoS attackers. Like you need a business defense, you know, a business line, a plan. Otherwise you just, it’s gonna be too volatile, too crazy out there to be out there with anything valuable, any resources.
Derric - Does this mean maybe things like developer first and all the PLG stuff we’ve heard for the last few years, is that going wayside to more of these, I would say closed, build a relationship with someone? Kind of what does that mean from a go-to-market standpoint? You know, how do you think about go-to-market of an API program or external API?
Kin - I don’t think that’s gonna go away. I mean, these things don’t just disappear, but it’s gonna get much harder and it’s gonna get much more, you know, the wins against it and the things against you and the things you’re gonna have to think about are gonna be a lot more difficult to do. And so it’s gonna be partner, know your customer, know, you know, KYD, know your developer, have a firm kind of grasp on that. And a lot of groups don’t really, a lot of large enterprises don’t understand that with a public API portal, like how to do that performance properly, how to, what to put out there, what not to, how to have an access control layer, how to have that set up. So it’s scary. And, but it’s, you still need that transparency and that kind of public access. You know, honestly, it should just be part of your regular public website, in my opinion, and be out there and you should have, it’s just like anything else on your website, what do you put publicly? What do you put behind a paywall? And, you know, how do you monitor its usage and understand its usage and evolve it so that you can, you know, be doing this well. It’s really not any different than your web properties and your mobile properties. It’s just whatever your applications are.
AIs Impact With Monetization And Closed API Programs
Derric - That totally makes sense there. And, you know, speaking on getting analytics and understanding consumption, you know, we’ve been hearing, you know, quite a few folks think around how AI is impacting that cost. You know, it could be sometimes quite high, you know, you’re building on new API until there’s real calls associated with it that we haven’t really seen before just to run the API. How is that impacting, you know, these things like monetization and potentially some of these somewhat closed or open API programs? And, you know, where do you see that going, right? Is, especially as now a policy being considered.
Kin - Well, AI just got a lot cheaper. I don’t know if you heard.
Derric - Very true, very true.
Kin - Seriously though, you know, that’s part of that cost management. I mean, you’ve got to understand what it takes to operate these things. You know, what does each API cost to stand up, maintain? What are the direct and indirect costs? You got to have a handle on that. And that’s what the cloud was kind of supposed to promise. I think us to kind of slice and dice this a little bit better. I don’t think it’s fully lived up to that, but you got to have that cost side and have real numbers and a real spreadsheet, you know, real formula for like, what’s expensive here, what’s worthwhile doing, and then translate that into the consumption side, you know, and with the right metrics and analytics, service composition, organizing your API resources, understanding your consumers, and you got to do the math on all of that. You got to have a spreadsheet or, you know, a good solution like most of, to help you kind of see, you know, build a dashboard and understand it. ‘Cause it’s going to get tight here. I think a lot of people spend a lot of money, not just, I don’t want to just point at AI. I think there’s been a lot of spend and a lot of technological areas that people are going to pull, are pulling back on. I’m already seeing companies start having to do more with less. I think there was a lot of promises around labor and employees and being able, you know, the, what was the Gartner thing with Twitter is O’Gartner was saying that, you know, people either need their existing staff to do 10X or they need to cut their staff 10%, you know? And so how does, how do you translate that into a dashboard and a set of API resources? All right, what are our API resources and how does our existing staff take that and squeeze 10% or, you know, 10X more work out of those resources we have by cleaning house, organizing better understanding customers, getting some freeloaders off some APIs, maybe that were launched at a certain time for a certain thing that doesn’t exist anymore. So just get more efficient about, you know, assessing the API landscape and enterprise and public and then, you know, figuring out, well, how are we going to make money on this? How are we going to pay for it and do it sensibly?
Current Day API Product Managers
Derric - Makes sense. Does that mean that the role of API product manager or product owner is changing? You know, especially as, you know, these teams are trying to get more efficient and lean. What does API product manager do today that, you know, they’re not doing five years ago with these APIs?
Kin - Honestly, I don’t think it’s going to change a whole lot. I mean, I think the, you know, for me, AI is just another application of our digital resources. Web had certain constraints, desktop has certain constraints. If you’re doing IoT, if you’re doing mobile, if you rode the last bot wave was like 2016, if you got on any of the I-PASS kind of integration platform is there’s been a lot of different waves. There was, you know, there was an AI wave around 2012, 13, Wolfram Alpha and IBM Watson. And, you know, it wasn’t as big as this moment we’re in right now. This is, you know, massive, but, you know, there’s all these waves and you’ve got to assess like, what are the applications of my digital resources? What new digital resources are we going to invest in? Which ones need to go away? And you run it like any other supply chain and factory and warehouse and distribution, you know, channels is figure out what’s making you money and what’s not. And I think hopefully the smoke and mirrors from AI kind of fall down, will go down a little bit and people can kind of get a little bit more honest about the math of what all this costs and start figuring out where the actual value is.
What Is Next With APIs
Derric - Makes sense there and we’re definitely seeing a lot of, you know, innovation, especially with the AI stuff, but, you know, it’s hard to also, you know, parse through what is next. You know, we’ve been hearing about AI gateways and trying to understand AI as a product or AI products, just like we saw with the API wave. What do you see coming in next with, you know, APIs and how AI is impacting that?
Kin - So here’s my stance as API evangelist. Nothing, I don’t care. Like AI, anything, I’m sticking to the fundamentals and this starting next week, like Tuesday, one o’clock, I’m gonna have a basic fundamentals of schema workshop. They’re paid and here’s basics of schema. Two o’clock is basics of APIs, open API, whether the different types of APIs, a lot of what we just talked about. Three o’clock is operations. What should you have? You should have a portal. You should have documentation. You should have an open API for these. So that’s Tuesday. Three fundamentals that I feel like are really missing people just don’t know their schema. They don’t know a open API and they don’t know their operations and have a consistent operational definition. Now, Wednesday or Thursday, excuse me, is gonna be governance of that, that we just talked about. So spectral rules and how do you lint that and then change, two o’clock is gonna be changes where you just deal with changes, change management, versioning, how do you source control? How do you have a source of truth? And then three o’clock is gonna be evangelism. How do you talk to people about this? How do you engage stakeholders? How do you have a conversation? And so three, six fundamentals that are ramping across every enterprise, nothing’s changed is HTTP. I’m not even talking GraphQL. I’m not gonna talk Kafka. I’m not gonna talk any of that. Your applications, how you apply your digital resources are up to you, web, mobile, desktop, AI. I’ll talk to you about those nuances and how that impacts, but really outside of that. And then once this has stood up, Wednesdays are gonna be where I start diving into other fundamentals. So monetization is gonna be one of the one o’clock where it’s just basic service composition, basic analytics, basic metrics. And then I’m wavering between HTTP, pagination, rate limiting, and a couple other fundamentals. And I’ll probably rotate between those on Wednesdays. It’ll be the kind of looser day. I’m not gonna talk to you about anything that’s outlandish, crazy ‘cause those are the same topics I’ve been talking about since 2010. And that basic monetization piece is like, very little has changed, very little has gotten better. We’ve gotten better tools and better services and better approaches, but really the need and the challenges have remained consistent. And I don’t see them going away at all. So I’m gonna just stay true to the course, stick to the fundamentals, and then I’ll let y’all, everybody else worry about the application of those resources. I’ll just help you kinda think about those essentials.
Derric - Totally agree. And definitely staying close to fundamentals and ensuring meeting customer needs is still more important than chasing the next shiny object. And we’ve seen so many waves where APIs impact everything from crypto and other waves as well. So at the end of the day, it’s about good API design and API governance, right? So.
Kin - Yeah, yeah. Just the basics. And I’m gonna do that for a few years. And I mean, I think that’s why what you guys offer is so important because the value exchange piece, yes, the monetization piece, the analysis, the analytics of that API landscape is critical, is essential. It’s not rocket science, but you gotta do it. And you gotta do it consistently over time before you’re gonna get better at it.
Closing Thoughts
Derric - Appreciate having you here, Kin, for our podcast. Any parting thoughts you wanna leave with the audience?
Kin - I mean, just, you know, figure out, you know, what do you do as an enterprise? Really kind of hang on to that in this moment. I think things feel like they’re moving faster than they ever have before. They’re volatile, they’re crazy. That’s not true. That’s just fabricated, manufactured. Stick to what you do best. Understand that, understand your customers and figure out the best ways you can kind of iterate and work on that. The rest, you know, will work itself out. It’ll kind of calm down a little bit here until whatever’s next, you know? And if you just have your kind of API strategy together, you’re gonna be able to weather this stuff and you’re gonna be able to make money and you’re gonna be able to adjust over time.
Derric - Awesome. Well, really appreciate being here, Kin, and until next time.
Kin - All right, thanks.
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