Important Announcement
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Symba User Expereince
October 25, 2023

The API Economy and Why the Future of Software is User Experience

There is a HUGE movement going on in the technology world that people need to learn about. It is going to fundamentally change how people experience software. It’s called the API economy. 

Let’s start by exploring a real world example everyone is somewhat familiar with… the construction industry and particularly home construction. 

Today, a home is not built by one person or company. It’s actually built by many companies. A construction company buys hundreds of different tools and individual pieces of a home to put together. They don’t put the entire thing together by scratch.   

Back when people did build homes from scratch, they were extremely generic and impersonal. They were huts, tents, and log cabins. People built the entire home themselves using materials and tools they had available to them. 

Then eventually, a supply chain of vendors that specialize in one thing began to form.  People started making individual tools like hammers, wheel barrels, screw drivers, shovels, and machinery. Bricks, shingles, insulation, doors, windows and many more parts of the home were now made by people who were experts in that specific material. 

What happened as a result? Home builders now had more freedom to build homes for a particular customer's needs and wants. The homeowner’s experience of living in a home began to improve rapidly. 

How does home construction relate to software applications? 

Let’s take a CRM for example. The largest software category in the world and the most important.  

Siebel Systems and Salesforce are responsible for developing the overall category. Both of these companies created similar user experiences and those user experiences are still largely the same today. 

Why are they largely the same? Because they built the entire application just like people back in the day built the entire home to be very general given their tools at the time. 

Enter the API Economy. 

What is an API? It allows different pieces of software to talk to each other. This concept has led to individual tools, and materials (data) being perfected by individual vendors much like the construction industry. 

What is happening? Software developers now have more freedom to build applications for a particular customer's needs and wants. A person’s experience of using software is beginning to improve rapidly. 

The supply chain is being built. We are beginning to transition from huts (Salesforce) to custom homes (Symba) constructed with the help of many companies. This movement is only just beginning. 

Examples of a few of the companies powering API economy


Why is this important for Symba? 

Despite being the largest sector of the US economy, the real estate industry is notorious for its lack of software adoption and has yet to really go through serious digital transformation. We see a massive opportunity. 

The backbone of the industry (brokerages and agents) are not leveraging software as well as they should. Why is this? They don’t have software that is catered to their needs. For example, agents are extremely mobile people and their CRM’s haven’t taken a mobile-first approach. It’s also because the average age of an agent is 55 so they are naturally going to be slow to adopt technology. 

We are building a CRM that caters perfectly to the needs of real estate agents by listening to users and tapping into the API economy. We will be the most agent focused software provider on the planet thanks to this approach.  

Below are some blogs that expand on how we are doing that. 

Agents vs Disruption

Historically, Mobile-first Applications Win

A New Age for CRMs