Worth the Effort? - TTHW and TTROI

Background

The simple fact of life for 3rd party developers (whether they are FIs or Fintechs) is that they will always have limited time and limited resources to build software.

Do you want to know if a 3rd party developer will spend their limited time and resources on building for our platform versus a competitor’s platform?

The math is easy.

Is the value of the API less than the effort it takes to develop with the API?

• They will not integrate with our platform.

Is the value of the API more than the effort it takes to develop with the API?

• They will integrate with our platform.

It is clear that we must ensure that the value of the API is more than the effort it takes to develop with the API.

The two main metrics that we have to track our success towards this goal are:

• TTHW
• TTROI

TTHW (Time to Hello World)

This measures how long it takes for developers to start from zero to having their first, authenticated API calls.

Our example projects on GitHub for the Consumer API¹ and Plugin Framework²³ help a lot with this, but the lack of self-service signup for API credentials means this is currently measured in days.

GOAL:

• Ideally less than 30 minutes!

TTROI (Time to Return on Investment)

This measures how long it takes for developers to start making a return on their investment (i.e. they must spend valuable time and resources to build on our platform).

We won’t have a good way to measure this other than asking (tactful) questions.

We can sort of figure this out based roughly on the time it takes from TTHW to when the integration is actually live, in Production⁴.

GOAL:

• Ideally less than 90 days!