Whenever I hear Wonderwall by Oasis starting, I cringe a little bit. It’s a perfectly fine song, don’t get me wrong, but it has been overplayed on the radio, at parties, and even by myself on my acoustic guitar (although I am not a very good player, trust me).
I loved the song when I was younger and couldn’t get enough of it, from my teenage years all the way into my early twenties. And now I almost can’t stand it.
In my thirties, I’ve noticed that a lot of new songs illicit a reaction that goes “Oh, I’ve heard that before—this is not new or innovative." So what happened? Is it just me that changed, or is it something else?
Attention, Attention!
To a degree, both are correct; every person goes through changes as they age, but there is also the world around us that changes. We know people’s attention spans are shrinking, and we as marketers are constantly having to come up with new ways of grabbing it.
In a best-case scenario, you have around 10 seconds to grab attention, but in reality, it’s probably somewhere around 6 seconds. If you manage to do this at the start, then you have around 30 to 40 seconds of attention that a person can give you.
Again, that’s a best-case scenario, so for safe measure let’s say you have 20 more seconds. This means you have to make your homepage full of keywords and as many attention-grabbing details as is humanly possible.
The attention-grabbing problem has been with us since the dawn of television advertising, and some of the “problems” are still the same:
“[We’re] an uninvited guest in the living room of a prospect with the magical power to make you disappear instantly.”
- John O’Toole, President of the American Association of Advertising Agencies (AAAA) from 1988-1995
He was talking about changing the channels on a TV. Today we are talking about scrolling and swiping.
With that sitting somewhere in the back of my mind, I knew we needed a change in our messaging. This is a story about how I decided we should change it to its current name: “API Intelligence Platform”, and I’ll give you my reasoning behind it. But first, let’s look into history and what our messages were before this.
I’m a hard rock kind of guy, so here’s an appropriate song for this section:
Stay in tune with your APIs
When you say we started 3 years ago, it doesn't seem that much, but somehow it feels like at least ten. Back in 2021., COVID was very much still a thing. Constant news about how many new infected people, constant news about vaccines, travel restrictions, and so on.
This just feels like it was ages ago. Treblle started without me, and when I came in the company was going for a couple of months. Vedran (founder of Treblle) of course, made a website, and it had a message: “Stay in tune with your APIs”.
I won’t lie; to me, this made perfect sense at the time. Treble (with one L) is a musical note. A high-pitched or shrill tone, voice, or sound, ranging from 6 kHz to 20 kHz. In music, treble refers to the higher notes and is often notated with the treble clef.
Treblle helps with API observability (back then we were calling it API monitoring). And the “Stay in tune” part made sense to me—when you explained it to me. But, that’s just it, isn’t it? You have to explain it to me in order for me to get it.
In a world that constantly craves something new and at the same time people have very short attention spans, this just did not work. That’s why we shifted to a new message, one that we thought paints a better picture of what Treblle’s all about.
Mission Control For Your APIs
Wow! The sound of “Mission Control For Your APIs” excites me to this very day. I visualize a NASA launch center with huge screens and people operating on their computers with headphones on, making sure everything runs smoothly for the astronauts on a rocket that is on its way to go where no man has gone before.
Sounds good when I explain it like that. But again, same as the first one, I am still tasked with explaining it, and everyone has a vivid imagination like me. Don’t get me wrong, having an imagination like mine does help, but sometimes it also can be a hindrance.
People reading this message don’t have a device that shows them what is going on in my head. Who knows, maybe Elon or Zuck, or these guys together come up with a technology where we can share thoughts with each other by sending mental images, but for now, we have to stick to words and try to explain what we are doing as directly as we can.
That’s what we tried to do with the next one.
End-to-End APIOps
Sometimes you try to be sneaky, and you try it by showing yours is at the cutting edge of the industry your product is in, but at the same time you need to sound familiar and non-threathening (in other words, you don’t want for people to feel stupid). Is the word “APIOps” to pretentious? I don’t know. It’s debatable.
What we know for sure “End-to-End”, “E2E”, “All in One”, “Swiss Army Knife of…” and similar constructions are just, to put it simply, overused. The internet is full of them. Depending on the industry, they still might work just fine, but technical people and developers have seen products promise this over and over again, and then watched that promise being stepped on, beaten to death and thrown into a trash can.
The result (unfortunately for us) is mistrust towards a product that claims the same.
“But Davor, you need to build that trust. Then there won’t be a problem.”
I agree, but if trust comes first, then let’s not start building our relationship by starting with the wrong words. After we reach a critical mass of satisfying customers, then we can play with our tagline, but not before that.
The Impact of AI
When we started with “End-to-End APIOPs” the AI revolution was just starting. No one was sure what an impact it might have or was the craze going to be here for a few months and then just disappear. We decided to play it safe this time and just LISTEN.
We like to say Treblle “listens in on your API” and it uses the collected data to show it to you in a beautiful dashboard with all the metadata you can imagine—full request and response details—in real time.
So basically, we were looking at customer usage, and one thing stood out - AI related endpoints and APIs were exploding. We have quite a lot of data so we use it to make an extensive report on API usage once a year.
We call it Anatomy of an API and, well, AI is skyrockerting and the booster engines are filled with (for us) very familiar fuel. A little something called APIs!
One of the things that stood out in 2024. Is that number of AI-related APIs grew by 807% compared to 2023, while the average growth across all other sectors and industries has been 10%.
And how do cool spy organizations call gathering useful data that they could use to make decisions? That’s right: They are GATHERING INTELLIGENCE!
And in AI, what does the “I” stand for? Again, it’s INTELLIGENCE!
Enter API Intelligence Platform!
API Intelligence Platform
Before we decided on this one, we had two finalists. One was “API Intelligence Dashboards” and the winner (spoiler alert) “API Intelligence Platform”.
We did gather some data from various analysts that told us some of the folks perceive us as “great dashboards that give valuable insights into their API landscape”.
I won’t lie, I am the kind of marketer where I do not like to fall into a trap where I want to push “How I see my product” vs. “How others see my product”.
However …
The thing is, Treblle really isn’t JUST dashboards. It does have a dashboard for quick analytics, but it goes much deeper than providing what I’m calling “true observability”, where it provides data you would normally need a team of engineers to dig it out and bring it to the surface.
Treblle just does this out of the box.
Not to mention all the other stuff like API security, governance, API docs… and so on (you can check out the website if you are really interested, right?). So, we couldn’t really decide outright, and we did what had to be done.
We A/B tested, and the rest is history. Sometimes things just sound better, and for one reason or another, “API Intelligence Platform” just really does sound better, and the word “dashboards” will probably fit in somewhere else. So there you have it, that’s the full history of how we became the “API Intelligence Platform” and what does it even mean.
The Future of API Intelligence
Who knows what the future brings? At Treblle we recently launched a complete overhaul of our platform, and Treblle 3.0 is out and about. This overhaul, complete with new features and functionalities, is the product of our growth as a company on all fields.
We are more comfortable in our positioning, and we as a team know how our platform makes the users feel, so the term “API Intelligence Platform” almost flowed out naturally as a result of us knowing where we fit in this AI-saturated world.
Maybe the term becomes another flop and this blog ends up being remembered as a desperate way of a marketer trying to explain to our current and potential customers what it actually means.
However, currently, I am betting this one will stay for a bit longer, and we as a team all believe in the message. We are simply maturing as a company and so is the market where AI (powered by APIs) has become inevitable.
