API Crafting Secrets: Into Fliptop API

From our perspective, APIs conquer all by making the integration of many different platforms and services possible. It enables computation and data from different entities to come together and work on a collective goal. We believe the world will spin faster as a result of API’s. We have an API first strategy when developing and because of this we have grown much quicker than expected.

Interview with Tom Lee, Product Manager and Growth at Fliptop. Originally from the UK he moved to San Francisco 3 years ago.

Tell us more about the development process of Fliptop API 
Our API has been one of our major products since the very beginning. Our development methodology includes daily stand-up and continuous deployment to meet our goal of time-to-market. We are big fan of cutting edge technologies, like Scala, and Lift. We use Lift extensively in our resultful APIs since it supports variety of Rest Web services, and it is stable, and it adopts View First model instead of traditional MVC model.

Our API has been one of our major products since the very beginning.

What are the key components of your core API infrastructure?
Our API is served with NGINX who connects to 3Scale for credential information as the gate keeper, scala lift web framework running on resin as the major API server, and finally MongoDB as the data storage.

When an API request comes in, NGINX goes to 3Scale to verify the API key that comes along with the request first. Then our web application running on scala lift web framework goes to MongoDB for the information that is involved in the computation, and serve the response back to the user.

What drove your choices in terms of technology and infrastructure?
Stability, flexibility, and ease of development are the criteria we use when we are evaluating technologies.

What proxy are you using for your API and why?
We use NGINX as our API proxy. Besides its high performance, scalability and predictable memory usage, its programmable configuration also introduces the flexibility that has never been seen in the peer solutions. Also, its user experience is more friendly to us, and it can be integrated with billing gateway (ex. Braintree, etc).

What are the specificities of your API?
The Fliptop API provides intelligent contact management options. We enrich, score, dedupe and clean contacts to make sales and marketing systems work better.

How can developers get a better taste of what your API does?
Developers can go to developer.fliptop.com and play with the active docs and see the flow charts we have created to explain how the response codes work.

Any roadmap/evolution plan that you can share with us?
We are doing some pretty exciting things around predictive analytics and a new integration API. Very soon you will be able to use the Fliptop API to predict which companies are most likely to spend money on your product. We call this the SpendScore.

Fliptop’s Customer Intelligence Platform predicts which companies will become your best customers. Their software combines public web and social data with your CRM and marketing application data in order to score your inbound leads, and identify companies to target. This provides a measurable improvement in sales productivity, and an increase in marketing conversion.