Cloudmanic Labs

At Cloudmanic we have built 3 products that enhanced another company’s platform. Two of them are in the bitbucket and the third, Photomanic, is lightly maintained and we have no plans to expand the offering. The secret to so little success with third party applications is that when you build on someone else’s platform you are not in charge—the platform provider is.

The Rise and Fall of Third Party APIs

I have been around the block a few times so I have seen the pattern I am about to describe again and again. A young, perky company tries to get noticed, bending over backwards to make developing on its platform easy and enticing to outside developers. Until one day the company grows up to the point that it can justify making changes ostensibly for the greater good. Said changes often include discontinuing parts of the company’s API, changing the terms of service, and new-found zeal for micromanaging the applications built on the company’s platform. As a developer you suddenly go from feeling like a partner contributing to a community to a flunky of the platform provider.

How My Love Affair With Evernote Came to an End

All 3 of the products Cloudmanic built on a third party platform were based on Evernote. Because good software applications take a lot of time to build, when we started developing the first product, Evermanic, we discussed our intentions with the Evernote team. We were assured that Evernote would help market the finished app and that we were building within the company’s terms of service. In other words, we were partners. And after months of work and tens of thousands of dollars in expenses, we were ready to take our partnership to the next level, to be part of the company’s app marketplace.

We launched Evermanic with great success and collaborated with Evernote to gain popularity. Soon, however, we were told to change the Evermanic name because it violated Evernote’s new terms of service. After months of frustrating back-and-forth Evernote finally agreed to make an exception. End of story? Not quite. We could keep the name, but Evernote would continue to help market our product—keeping us in its community—only if we did a nearly complete rewrite. We received a long list of changes that would have altered the entire concept of Evermanic. It was almost as if Evernote had hired us as contractors. Evernote was excited about the product we pitched, but once we built Evermanic the company wanted to micromanage it into something else.

At the time Evermanic was one of Evernote’s best third party apps in terms of quality. Cloudmanic could have been a showcase for other developers—Evernote was promoting tons of applications that that did not have the same quality standards—but the timing was bad. Evernote had really started to explode, and the need for outside developers was less urgent. Honoring the deal Evernote offered third party developers to embrace its platform was not important anymore. Evernote had no interest in small partners—it just wanted flunkies.

Even so, Evermanic became a popular application. We explained to Evernote that we had little desire to make the changes demanded because our users were happy. Evernote was a much-loved application, and we delighted its users with a specialized tool that made their Evernote experience even better. So why wouldn’t Evernote embrace and market Cloudmanic as a partner? Why did Evernote make changes to its API and terms of service that required further investment of development time just to keep Evermanic functioning?

Be Careful Where You Build

Though I used Evernote to illustrate my point, I have watched this same scenario unfold repeatedly. Twitter flipped most of its third party developers the bird (no pun intended...maybe) a few years back rather publicly. There are a lot of advantages to partnering with a company to build on its platform—most notably access to the company’s user base. As a software developer it is really appealing to be able to focus on building something amazing and have customers waiting once you are ready to launch, but this perk comes at the cost of being beholden to the company you built your app for.

Needless to say Cloudmanic is out of the business of building applications to enhance other companies’ platforms. Building products we control is a far better way to scale up our business.