Unless you happen to be a Fortune 500 company with seemingly infinite resources and enough departments to run a small government, odds are that your business can’t do everything itself. There are always going to be situations where you’ll need to bring in outside help, and here we’re giving you some great examples of how APIs and outsourcing can be put to work for your company.

Casino Sites

The online casino industry is one of the best examples of a wide network of specialists working together in harmony to create something successful. Aside from the actual sites which feature online payment plugins, layers of cybersecurity software and often outsourced customer service options, the featured games come from a wide range of different developers working in tandem with publishers.

You can take the example of the recent Adventures Beyond Wonderland betting game, which adds an extra layer with the live element. To play the game, players first have to log in through a cybersecurity verification API, make a deposit usually through a payment platform API, and then load up the game developed by an external company that may also have outsourced the physical studio space for the production. It’s a whole web of interconnected parts.

Online Retailers

When it comes to any kind of online store or shopping, there are certainly plenty of massive networks like Amazon that are more than capable of operating everything in-house. They are able to cover the multitudes of moving parts for everything from product listing to all the ins and outs of SEO, but for small startups, that’s obviously not possible.

That is where platforms like Shopify come in. Whether it’s directly through Shopify themselves, or via their plugin available for platforms like WordPress, they are able to give those with next-to-no expertise to set up a functioning webstore in a very short time. Beyond that, there are dozens of ready-made plugins for features like webchats and marketing via the dedicated Shopify App Store that can quickly bring a retailer up to professional levels.

Software Development

There is a common misconception about developers that every project starts from scratch and is custom-made for each individual app. However, if that was the case, development time would be so long that it would be unrealistic and there would rarely be any big progress. While outsourcing particular components of a large app is common, and having multiple companies working on a single project is natural, it’s in the APIs and libraries that the real collaboration happens.

software development

Source: Unsplash

Most developers will swear by sites like GitLab and GitHub which provide a wide range of handy development tools, but most importantly contain vast quantities of source code. Developers can use this pre-made source code as a base for a lot of basic functions, and by the time that things like standard code libraries and APIs are added in, a lot of development simply becomes stitching things together.

The old mantra is to work smarter, not harder, and each example above follows this perfectly. If you’re starting out in business, always make sure to see what resources are available to you already!