Expand your API community with self signup
Finally your API Store is ready for production. You have a bunch of published APIs and everything seems to look good to you but you need to be able to reach out to the community or in other words get subscribers to try this API Store and get a chance to experience your APIs.
Now the problem is how can you get other users to be a part of your API store and try out the given APIs. Sure you might answer saying that all API management solution providers facilitate the capability to be able to invite other external consumers to be part of your API Store community and try out your APIs. The real question is how practical is it for you to have to initiate inviting these members perhaps one by one to your store? This can really be a hassle and also will cause a barrier to expand your user community.
How cool would it be if you users would be able to find your API Store and register themselves to be a part of your API Cloud community and your cloud based business.
With this in place you do not need to go to the users, the users can come to you. Any users with the URL to your cloud API store can provide their email and register to use your APIs. As a result of this, you would be able to grow your community faster.
Do I have to allow access for all users who sign up to my API Store?
One drawback of users being able to freely signup to your API store is that you might feel you do not have control of who gets to register to your API Store. You might want to allow users to register while also having certain reasons to not allow certain people registering to your store even though they want to register. To address this problem what you would need is a flow similar to the below.
Let’s assume the scenario where an external user registers himself to you API Store. (User A)
With this you are still in total control over your users while allowing self registration/self signup to you API Store. I would recommend this approach as the best way to enable self registration for your store.
If scanning through each and every signup request is too tedious for you, you can allow user to be able to signup to your store without having to get your approval. This is another pattern of allowing self signup to your API Store. In this case if you want to get rid of certain users, you can always use the user management capabilities to delete the users which you do not want to be a part of your store after they self register to it.
How can I achieve this with my API Store?
The WSO2 API Cloud provides this cloud based solution of self signup for your WSO2 Cloud API Store. With the self signup feature for your Store you can configure how you want to allow the access for external users by just one click.
You can read more about the feature in this blog and follow this guide to enable the feature today and allow the public to be a part of your API Store. Not only that you can further customize all the notification emails sent to the store owner and users by following this blog.
Once your users have joined your API Store you can start thinking about running this as a an API business by referring my post, here you can learn how to commercialize your Store. Also don’t forget to use some of our available community features to see how well your Store is doing among your new self signed up subscribers. Checkout the available community features provided by WSO2 API Cloud and introduce them to your API community.
Expose your APIs with the WSO2 API Cloud today and grow your user community with the self signup feature. Register with WSO2 Cloud for free today!!
For further questions and inquiries please feel free to reach out to our Cloud support team through our email cloud@wso2.com. Hope to see you around!
