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Comment by b203 | Hacker News Reader

Is it really that important that the time to get to 200 should be small? I understand that it may be frustrating to get started, but assuming I am stuck to this API for a long time, I am lot more worried about stability, quality, performance and availability of the system than time to onboard.

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A case where it can matter is when there is no clear commitment yet to use that API.

For instance if there is 2 or 3 alternative services, and you want to explore one of them to have a better idea of the trade-offs. Setting up an account and making “real” requests will be your benchmark.

Actually, even for a service with a decent chance to commit to it, there will still be an exploration phase to get an estimate for the implementation cost. Depending on how much the devs struggle to just try the API, the project could get more or less reprioritized for lower hanging fruits.

I'm with you on those other aspects being very important, but I'm not sure they are more important in general. After all, relatively few APIs are truly essential, offering access to some exclusive facility that users of that API couldn't also find somewhere else and/or implement themselves. For everything else, unless you can hold enough of a potential user's initial interest for them to carry on trying things out, the other stuff doesn't matter.

It’s important if you lose a significant number of potential API users along the way.

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