In the 1960s, the Port of London was one of the busiest in the world.
Thirty thousand dockers. Centuries of history. Deep expertise in moving cargo, sack by sack, crate by crate.
Down the coast sat Felixstowe. A tiny port. Miles away from the action and expertise of the Port of London.
Then the shipping container arrived, and the shipping lines, the customers, decided they wanted one thing: a standard box, handled the same way, everywhere.
London’s docks debated it. The container threatened jobs, tradition, the whole way of working. Felixstowe just built the crane.
Within twenty years, London’s upstream docks were closed. Felixstowe became the biggest container port in Britain. It still is.
The customers chose the interface. The ports only got to choose whether to be ready.
The same thing is happening to B2B software, right now. Your customers are choosing the interface. It’s an API. Your only decision is whether to build the crane.
I know because we just watched it happen.
The ultimatum
We signed a new customer recently. A mobility SaaS platform in Europe. The reason they bought had nothing to do with us.
Their customers had started asking for API access. Polite requests at first. Feature-request tickets. The kind of thing that sits in a backlog with a “someday” label on it.
Then one customer stopped asking.
Give us APIs, they said, or we leave.
Overnight, “expose our platform via APIs” went from the someday pile to the number one infrastructure priority in the company. Within weeks they were evaluating gateways. Within months they’d signed a three-year deal.
One ultimatum did what two years of roadmap discussions couldn’t.
The developer in the room
Somewhere inside every customer you have, a developer is being asked to wire your product into their stack. Automations, internal tools, and increasingly AI agents working over their own data. Gartner reckoned more than 30 per cent of the growth in API demand by 2026 would come from AI and LLM-based tools. From where I sit, that looks conservative.
When that developer finds a clean, documented API, you get wired in. Deeply. Removing you becomes a migration project with a budget line.
When that developer finds nothing, they build a workaround. Screen scraping. CSV exports on a cron job. And every planning meeting from then on, your product is the awkward one. The one with the duct tape. The first name on the list when someone asks what can be cut.
Try this
Ask your customer success team one question this week.
“Which customers have asked about API access, and what did we tell them?”
Read the answers carefully. Somewhere in that list is a polite request on its way to becoming an ultimatum.
London’s docks got twenty years of warning. You’ll get one renewal cycle.
Build the crane.
Further reading
- Gartner on AI and LLM tools driving API demand
- The API management market’s growth trajectory
- B2B churn causes, including integration and value gaps
- Tyk’s open-source gateway on GitHub
- Tyk documentation for the build-vs-buy homework
