Spencer Levitt and Austin Pager met as classmates at Northwestern University and spent the next few years creating applications powered by a wide range of APIs. After developers continued to turn to them to help with API integrations, they set out to create a tool for API-first companies to offer simpler integration experiences.
“During Y Combinator, which we participated in after graduating from Northwestern a year earlier, one of the first customers began using our tool to help their sales process,” Levitt and Pager said. “He realized it was a great way to explain the value of his software to potential buyers. “This was our ‘aha’ moment.”
Levitt and Pager co-founded Coast, a platform that allows a sales team to demo their company's APIs through a dashboard that executes live requests visually and in the browser. With Coast, sales teams can show what prospects can build on APIs, customized to a given prospect's brand and use case.
There are certainly other software demo platforms on the market, many of them with significant venture capital backing. Demostack, a startup developing a service that allows SaaS companies to quickly create product demos, raised $34 million last April. Meanwhile, Consensus, a company that develops an automation platform for SaaS product demos, recently raised $110 million. Other notable providers include Arcade, Demodesk, and CloudShare.
Image: Coast
But Coast differs from most other demo tools because it doesn't rely on an interface. Instead, it builds user interfaces from lines of code, using a company's sandboxed or publicly accessible APIs to create an interactive customer experience.
“The API-first space is growing rapidly, but the tools that enable its sales teams haven't kept pace,” Levitt and Pager said. “Coast helps by automatically generating visual interfaces that are pre-configured for the API based on the underlying technical specifications. Sellers use Coast to deliver personalized, interactive demos throughout the sales cycle: for outings, live demos, follow-ups, and even during implementation.”
The emergence of Coast comes at a time when APIs are gaining importance for software companies, in terms of revenue, particularly those in the enterprise space. According to a RapidAPI survey, about 65% of developers reported that they were more reliant on APIs in 2022 than in 2021. And these APIs are being monetized somewhat aggressively. The same survey found that there has been a 16% increase in the rate of APIs that are marketed only in the financial sector.
In a separate Forrester survey, commissioned by API management company Axway, 72% of respondents (all business decision makers) said they believed greater API adoption could lead to an approximately 26,4% increase in their business growth. digital business.
“We've found that C-suite managers are always looking for a better way to showcase the power of their software. Executives also care about making sure their customer service teams have the best resources when speaking with partners,” Levitt and Pager said. “With Coast, we help put technical skills in the hands of frontline customer support teams to easily showcase the power of their APIs without requiring additional engineering support.”
Coast claims early acceptance from customers including Unit, Finch, Oso, Sardine, Column Tax and Enode. It has so far raised $2,1 million in seed funding from Y Combinator, Liquid2 Ventures, GTMfund and Brickyard, as well as individual investors such as Dropbox co-founder Arash Ferdowsi and Segment co-founder Calvin French-Owen.
“Coast is solving an important and timely problem for both API sellers and buyers,” Ferdowsi said in a decidedly complimentary email. “I could see the need firsthand in Dropbox. Purchasing an API affected many parts of the organization, and bringing an API to market effectively is expensive and challenging. Coast is attacking a rapidly growing market with novel software that elegantly demonstrates the power of an API.”
