From Vision to Reality: The Journey of DigitalAPICraft

In this exclusive Q&A, our founder, Bharath Kumar , shares insights into the company's inception, the challenges faced along the way, and the pivotal moments that shaped DAC's success. This conversation offers a unique glimpse into the world of tech entrepreneurship, the evolving API economy, and the future of digital transformation.

01. Could you take us on the journey of how the idea of DigitalAPICraft came about and eventually turned into reality?

I worked with Apigee around 2015, before starting DigitalAPICraft. Apigee was acquired by Google in 2016, but somewhere just before the acquisition, my head was completely around the API landscape and the impact that APIs would make in the next few years.

It was a conversation with one of the NSI partners that changed the whole future of the 100+ people who work at DigitalAPICraft. They were pitching Apigee API platforms when I realized the huge potential. Many enterprises needed help, creating opportunities for products, tools, and developer experiences. This insight led me to resign from Apigee and jump into starting the company. I had no idea where to start, but I just knew that I needed to find some customer engagements. So, for a couple of years, I was in consulting.

I went back to Apigee, told them my story about working for the first client, and building APIs for them as DigitalAPICraft, a two-person company working from my apartment from 2015 to 2016. I told them about my new venture and sought work, leveraging my pre-sales to post-sales implementation experience. After Google acquired Apigee in 2016, we became their first Google Cloud partner. By 2018, we had grown to 40+ people and achieved a couple of million dollars in revenues in terms of consulting. Some Apigee colleagues also joined me, and we figured out that we needed to expand beyond consulting. We recognized the increasing complexity of the API landscape for enterprises and saw opportunities in APIs, tools, and automation.

We began the product development in 2017-18, starting with an open banking regulatory solution that helped us win our first major customer. We identified our product-market fit by understanding client pain points and focusing on the top five issues we could address.

This got shaped in 2019, and then the pandemic came, changing the whole course of the tech business, and bringing our first product customer.

02. Thinking back to the early days of DAC, what were the major hurdles you faced, and how did you navigate through those challenges?

When you start a company, you want to do many things. With constrained resources, hiring the right team and building a product is not an easy job. Experimenting and creating the first MVP is a major challenge. How do you ideate, whiteboard, and see the product live? You need a strong team to build and believe in your vision.

Putting together a team was the first hurdle. I was lucky to have the dream team because friends from Apigee joined me, believing in the problem we were solving as part of our consulting.

How do you pitch and sell software that is a product, not a service, to customers, and communicate the problem being solved? You need the right messaging; listen to their problems first, and be smart enough in that thirty-minute conversation to say, "Hey, I can solve the top five of your current challenges with my product." Crafting this message took almost 6 months. We had thirty conversations, seeing some successes, but it was still not gaining traction.

Winning product-market fit (PMF) was the second biggest hurdle. The third was finding the first customer. The fourth was scaling the product and selling it to the top three customers. Getting the top five customers was the fourth challenge, and the fifth was reaching a million-dollar business.

As a product company, each milestone is key: from PMF, to a POC, to the first customer, scaling to the top eight customers, and reaching two million-dollar ARR.

03. As the founder, what do you believe are the pivotal elements that have driven the success and continuous growth of DAC?

Decision-making at the right time with the right set of people is key to any technology company. As a founder, this is crucial because you've got limited resources, time, money, and people.?

How do you build a product that you can take to the market quickly? The challenge is identifying how to create something that's ahead of the competition and solves the key problems enterprises are facing today.

It's important to note that solving the top five to ten problems for the customer may become irrelevant over time. Once you've achieved initial success, you've got to keep innovating from the second and third phases onwards.

The next challenges are: How do you scale? How do you differentiate yourself from competitors? What is the key USP of your product compared to other companies?

04. Could you share a standout moment or milestone in DAC’s evolution that highlights its adaptability to market dynamics and customer needs?

A key milestone was our decision to implement a solution as a product first. I learned from my experiences at Google and Apigee, where I was part of building solution accelerators.

Creating industry-specific solutions was another crucial step. Winning the largest bank in the world and selling them a million-dollar license was pivotal.

It pays off when you have a conversation with the right customer at the right time, especially when they're experiencing the pain points we envisioned 3 years earlier.

Seeing all our products deployed to the first or second customer was a defining moment for DAC, proving that our strategy and decisions were well thought through.

05. Looking ahead, what are your visions and aspirations for the future of DAC, and how do you plan to keep innovating in the ever-evolving landscape of API development?

Gartner recently mentioned us as one of the software vendors to build an API marketplace. We're known for building API cataloging, marketplaces, and portals.

Currently, we're developing an exciting solution that goes beyond banks, insurance, or telecom. We're addressing a larger problem where API gateway and platform companies have introduced complexities and vendor lock-in challenges.

There isn't a product or market looking at this larger landscape, and that's what we are envisioning—to solve the entire API landscape and bring a streamlined governance solution around the API economy.

Our goal is to help enterprises realize their entire investment and progress to an API maturity model.