Web Dev Shops (and Creative Agencies) are everywhere, but I am yet to see a company that focuses on developing APIs for clients. Sure, it is most often part of the development of a mobile app, but what about smallish companies that want to make their data (whatever it is) available more programmatically. For example, a large restaurant chain might want to make its menu more accessible; or a non-profit foundation may want to make its data more accessible. Thoughts?
There probably is a market, but it's a lot smaller than building general web/mobile applications.<p>The kind of clients that want to build an API 1) already have a main product/website and 2) are likely more technical than average. It's probably something they could do themselves.
I just got finished building one for a client and I'm getting ready to start another. So there's always a market if you solve the problem well.<p>Coincidentally, I'm looking for a python coder to work with on this next one. If anyone is interested in learning more, send me an email.
Mashery (<a href="http://mashery.com/" rel="nofollow">http://mashery.com/</a>) has done this for Netflix, Rotten Tomatoes, and others. I think they're more about providing useful API access technologies than actually doing contract work to get things set up though.
If you're just thinking "a shop that develops APIs", that is the same as "a shop that writes code". You are not offering the client anything tangible they can identify. Unless you restrict your clients to software houses without the time or expertise to write their own APIs, the larger non-developer world of clients has no idea what you are offering.<p>I write APIs. I specialize in them, but for a specific purpose. I develop 3d animation technologies and then expose them via an API. I then license use of that API to 3rd parties, hosting the servers in both cloud and colocation. That is something tangible they can grasp. This is after spinning my wheels for a while trying to do what you seem to be thinking.
There is a decent market.<p>While its not our core business, we host content APIS for some large publishers. Because we're ingesting their content anyway (content syndication is our main business) and we already have a robust API, we've productized it to provide APIs as a service back to our content providers.<p>I think content and ecommerce APIs are where you will see the most traction.
What value an "API-only company" would offer that a "web dev shop" wouldn't?<p>Following the same train of thought, why aren't there shops out there that ONLY do "web forms" (not talking about SaaS here), or webdesign agencies that only do "landing pages"?
I suspect there could be a huge market if Apple allowed frameworks to be sold on the mac app store on a per seat basis - so framework developers would get some cut of each sale.
There is at least a market for an API toolkit where you could choose an API model, security features, the DB to connect to, the language to use and the data model.
Another one I came across was mashape.com "A place to easily discover, manage and hack badass APIs". Few examples: NLTK, sentiment analysis, DuckDuckGo.