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Benefits of being a Manifold Service Provider

Pika/Pack and the Future of Front-end Development

With Manifold’s new Marketplace-as-a-Service (MaaS), developer-facing platforms can now add a cloud services marketplace to their ecosystem with little effort and zero upfront costs.

Announcing Marketplace-as-a-Service for Developer Platforms

Achieving Hockey Stick User Growth: OAuth2 Can Help

Your Image Processing System is How Hackers Will Attack Your Company

Maximizing your product’s conversion rate

So you’ve developed an amazing service, listed it on Manifold and might be thinking, what's next? The Manifold co-marketing program is just one way we support our partners through their launch in our marketplace, through coordinated marketing strategies.

An introduction to the Manifold co-marketing program

6 Ways You Should Be Marketing Your API to Developers	

Marketplaces make it easy to add new features and extend your reach

Building Better ReasonML APIs with Chainable Functions

With Manifold’s [new Marketplace-as-a-Service (MaaS)](/platforms), developer-facing platforms can now add a cloud services marketplace to their ecosystem with little effort and zero upfront costs.

Three years ago, we set out to build a streamlined solution to help developers discover and manage cloud services on any platform. Today we are making our core marketplace technology available to developer platforms through an embeddable service.

> With the release of Manifold’s Marketplace-as-a-Service, we’ve made it easy for any developer facing company to deliver an amazing add-on experience.
>
> __- Jevon MacDonald__, co-founder and CEO of Manifold.

Developers want to have easy access to the tools and services they know and love, but building a marketplace of add-on tools, services, and server images is complex, and can take years. It requires a significant mix of technology and business development investments. Instead, platforms can simply use Manifold’s Marketplace-as-a-Service to rapidly add a fully populated marketplace ready for their developer customers to use, driving increases in customer adoption and revenue.

Integrating the MaaS is simple and fully customizable with a GraphQL API and flexible web components.  The marketplace comes pre-populated with a customizable catalog of cloud service providers that is always growing, as well as unified experiences for billing, role-based access control (RBAC), centralized secret management, service provider on-boarding, and provisioning.

![how it works](//images.ctfassets.net/orhow18i20f4/2DYXvpfH0mgz3m7bNtyLZ7/3f81dd9d2aca94b82d25352523d9ec58/how_it_works.jpg)

Our higher order Web Components provide an out-of-the-box experience which automatically authenticates with the Manifold marketplace API to discover, provision, and manage resources, and makes starting your own marketplace a breeze.

The experience can be further customized through integrating individual Web Components, or by interacting directly with the Manifold marketplace API using our GraphQL interface.

![cloud platform](//images.ctfassets.net/orhow18i20f4/2VGhZdelWCfmjoaREb5Opu/b79cd41b2f1308af4ff67457f6179482/cloud_platform.jpg)

Your web UI uses Manifold auth to connect your user to our Marketplace API to create a contextualized experience.

With an integrated marketplace, you have complete control to customize the types of services available in your catalog. You can choose services from our existing catalog and also introduce your own products and services.

---
<div style="text-align: center">
<h4>Want to embed your own marketplace?</h4>
<a title="get in touch" href="/platforms"/><img src="//images.ctfassets.net/orhow18i20f4/1ua3948Uno8CZTy7d4ORwT/5590344491e535fb0d90dca02dd4e094/get_in_touch.png" style="max-width: 193px; margin: 0.5rem auto !important;" /></a>
</div>

---


## Providers
Cloud service providers build great technology that developers want, but it can be difficult and time consuming to scale it into a profitable business. It requires them to reach an increasingly fragmented developer community, build complex billing engines, and establish operational capabilities. In <a href="https://medium.com/hostifi/hostifi-2-0-why-im-completely-rewriting-my-5-735-mrr-saas-d2744734b42e" target="_blank">this recent article</a>, Reilly Chase from HostiFi takes us behind the scenes of what it's like to build his own company and some of the challenges he faced.

By partnering with Manifold, [service providers](/providers) can avoid a lot of these challenges and list their products in our marketplace, write their own descriptions and set their own pricing.  At the end of every month, they get paid for the usage that’s generated through Manifold.

![provider dashboard](//images.ctfassets.net/orhow18i20f4/UiBhMMAyBIx0bzhd41ywh/f15e0710bdd4c30247681c0e4093efb6/provider_dashboard.jpg)

Providers get a complete billing solution and will benefit from our direct marketing activities as well as from partnerships we establish with strategic developer platforms. As mentioned above, these platform partners embed our catalog and use our provisioning and billing technology to offer an add-on marketplace to their users. Getting listed in these marketplaces puts our providers’ products in front of millions of developers around the world. For example, the platforms we are currently working with have over 12 million developers and this number will only grow over time as we partner with more ecosystems.


---
<div style="text-align: center">
<h4>Watch the announcement webinar to learn about being a Provider</h4>
<a title="Watch webinar" href="https://manifold.wistia.com/medias/9oxwrqt1d3" target="_blank"/><img src="//images.ctfassets.net/orhow18i20f4/5KGwkTS53fbR9TjpgaaN9A/99ce7ab490ffbdae4ce35cd7435cb096/watch_the_webinar.png" style="max-width: 225px; margin: 0.5rem auto !important;" /></a>
</div>

---

__Want to add your product to our catalog?__ [Learn more](/providers)

## Developers
Modern developers are using more cloud services for their applications than ever before. According to F5’s State of Application Services report for 2019, <a href="https://www.f5.com/state-of-application-services-report/interactive-report-2019/key-finding-1" target="_blank">“87% of respondents have multi-cloud architectures, driven by an app-first methodology”</a>.  As the number of services continues to grow, they must choose their cloud platform carefully or risk getting locked into one that limits the tools available to them. Provisioning new services also requires developers to establish separate payment and security profiles with every provider. This gets pretty complex when teams of developers need access to the same services.

Using Manifold, developers can discover, provision, secure and pay for all of their cloud services and share access with their team from a single account.

![terminal](//images.ctfassets.net/orhow18i20f4/5aQZrwO7eRJukdP0X910FU/5fce602fc75c7617f3dc2e4bc51a9929/terminal.jpg)

<div style="text-align: center">
<h3>Get started with Manifold</h3>
<a title="explore the marketplace" href="/services"/><img src="//images.ctfassets.net/orhow18i20f4/3P1rlqMoaO9DHMVcYxORDp/322346116ea88ddeb3dded3fe1c18fec/explore_the_marketplace.png" style="max-width: 225px; margin: 0.5rem auto !important;" /></a>
</div>


The goal of any online business is to maximize its conversion rate. You want to create as many opportunities for developers to see your product at the top of the funnel and then you want to take your best swing at converting them while revising and optimizing over time to increase the likelihood they adopt your product.

On Manifold, you have a number of opportunities to surface your product in front of potential users, while also being shown amongst potential alternatives. So how do you stand out from the rest? How do you maximize the likelihood that a user will choose your services over another? It starts by creating a high-quality product listing.

Let's take a look at where your product is shown in the marketplace, and how you can take best advantage of every opportunity.

## Showcasing your product

The catalog listing and your service page are the two main opportunities for you to show off your product in the Manifold marketplace.

#### Catalog listing

The catalog listing is where users discover products by category (database, logging, monitoring, etc) and are inspired to use new services and learn different use cases for services they already know and love. The catalog is shown on the Manifold homepage and in the Dashboard.	

![discoverservices](//images.ctfassets.net/orhow18i20f4/7DEMdgOW4LfqdO8meCWibp/137e673fd9b10bac3c45a1811fb3e2d2/discoverservices.png)

#### Service page

The service page is a singular page which presents the value prop of a service. It gives a product overview, screenshots, and your pricing and features. Think of your Manifold service listing as a landing page for your product, it needs to convey the use case of your service and educate users on the breadth of your features.

![listing](//images.ctfassets.net/orhow18i20f4/6ooXmdFEpVqCqTYEn7cHi3/66a65713341322fb3c7f74e84701316d/listing.png)

## Where should you start?

Starting your service with a high-resolution color logo is the best way to grab a developer’s attention. Logos which are grounded on a backdrop of color stand out from the rest of the pack, and enable you to bring your brand colors to your listing on both the dashboard and website.

Your product overview should consist of succinct feature descriptions which highlight the core value prop of your service. Having 3-4 feature descriptions in your overview is ideal, so to not have users fight through a wall of text to understand your service (and maybe toss in an emoji or ✌️.)

If you have additional features you would like to highlight, I recommended including them as part of your pricing matrix. This will display the features being included with the product in a more compact manner.

![yesnoplanselect](//images.ctfassets.net/orhow18i20f4/k5bu7KAtPvBsHKBKasbbh/7d1ac890081003c92636b0b9090c504d/yesnoplanselect.png)

## Pricing and packaging

When it comes to pricing and packaging, you want to make sure you’re lowering the barrier to making a purchase decision. Your plans will show up in two distinct places: on the website where new users will be deciding whether to start using your product and in our dashboard where existing users are adding additional services or changing which plan they are buying. 

Each partner has full control over their pricing when it comes to selling your product on Manifold, but we encourage our partners to consider the impact of having clear, concise representations of your products’ features and pricing and can help guide you with targeting our user base.

## Tell your story in pictures

Your screenshots are the most compelling section of your listing. These pictures explain your product to users and enable them to understand what they can do with your product. To tell a good story in screenshots, it can be good to select a specific use-case. Users will project themselves in your solution, making their purchase decision easier.

It can be good to isolate parts of the UI you want to be fixtures in the story you are telling, calling attention to specific features which were described so users can understand how what you’ve described before operates. They are effectively test-driving your product by looking at it.

![plan-screenshots](//images.ctfassets.net/orhow18i20f4/7EsfhFCCSOtPqBtYXCTiB9/999a0b163a94f9423c1135ca5f429a2c/plan-screenshots.png)

## Don't forget about the command line

Our users are primarily developers, which means they often live inside their IDE and terminals. We take pride in integrating with developers’ existing workflows through a suite of integrations. If developers are operating from the command line we want to meet them there, so we have replicated our web experience in the Manifold CLI.

You can review your product’s buying experience in the Manifold CLI using `manifold create` before launching on our platform.

![cli-creating](//images.ctfassets.net/orhow18i20f4/S0jhfyAbAafnKNNWLbXrC/e545e6caf155f01de9543af71a07cce0/cli-creating.png)

## Take advantage of co-marketing opportunities

We have [recently launched a program](https://www.stage.manifold.co/blog/an-introduction-to-the-manifold-co-marketing-program) for our partners to collaborate on marketing opportunities. This program aims to amplify the amount of exposure a partner receives throughout the Manifold network through collaboration across marketing activities such as content creation and social media.

## Are you interested in becoming a partner?

If you would like to learn more about how to list your service on the Manifold marketplace, [click here](/partners) to read about our partner program and start your integration.


Build it and they will come, right? Unfortunately, that's not always how it works. In a world where every existing product is battling for fleeting attention and new developer tools are launching every day on ProductHunt, it can be tough to get the right people to notice your product – and more importantly, remember it when they need it.

Even the most promising technology can struggle to gain traction without a thoughtful marketing strategy. Understanding the fundamentals and learning from some of the best in the industry can put your company on the right path for growth.

## Defining the Challenge

Marketing a new service to developers can be tricky for several reasons. First, developers are consistently sold to because they carry significant sway in the purchasing decisions for the companies that they work for. This pent up ad and sale fatigue make difficult to get your message across typical marketing channels. 

The second factor is that there is a high overhead for changing mission-critical services and switching  typically involves significant work on the part of the developer(s) and their team. So the benefits of using your new tool or technology must outweigh those hefty switching costs clearly and obviously.

Lastly, technical audiences tend to vet new products in a much more critical way. Standard landing pages with fluffy copywriting underperform solution-based product pages backed up quantitatively. 

Taking those factors into consideration it becomes more clear why some of the best developer focused software products build their marketing strategy around content.

## Kicking off with Content

Not all content is created equally. Browsing Medium you're sure to come across posts announcing the launch of a new product or service that leaves readers thinking "ok, so what?" A post like that might get a few clicks throughs,  but after that visit, the product fades away. 

What best-in-class companies do is use content to create a story. They deeply understand their ideal user's daily life and daily struggles – and understand how their product can fit in to that flow. They then create content around questions, concerns, and solutions that are truly useful. Sometimes, the content doesn’t even mention their product. It is advice, suggestions, and data that builds brand recognition around a known problem.

Here are some ideas to get your gears churning:

- __Tutorials__ - If your product truly solves a problem (and it should!) creating content around defining and solving that problem is a great place to start. You can create tutorials for several mediums like blogs, video, and social to see what works and what doesn't. Then, once you start to see results you can narrow your strategy moving forward.
- __Comparisons__ - These are typically the top performing search engine landing pages for technical products and once your company starts to get some recognition is an area that should be invested in. When users are evaluating a new tool they want to see how it stacks up technically and monetarily. Creating well-designed product pages and blog post that can rank well in search results is a great way to own the conversation and highlight your differentiators. 
- __Courses/Webinars__ - If you're an expert on a topic, teach it. There are several low-friction platforms out there for hosting this type of content that make management easy. One caveat is to make sure the content is directionally related to your product. Educational videos are a great way to give some of your knowledge away in exchange for an email. They are also a helpful lead tool for your website and for advertising campaigns.
- __Case Studies__ - spending time on case studies is an easy way to ease buyer concern about using your product. They want to see recognizable names that have used and have loved your product. Give away a free subscription if you have to, it will be worth it. 
- __eBooks__ - while they may be more time consuming to create, eBooks are great way to provide deep value and instantly brand yourself or your company as an expert on a topic. CloudAMPQ and Intercom are two companies that have successfully used eBooks to drive customer growth. A great way to cut down on the time and cost to create an eBook is to write a series of blog posts on a particular topic. Once the series is complete, repackage and bundle the collection as an eBook.
- __Data__ - if your product offers interesting insights try to package it in a way that would be useful to other developers. While in a different category, Match.com annually publishes a study on singles in the US and it drives traffic, press and undoubtedly users back to their product. 

## Learn from the best
One of the best ways to learn a new skill is to watch how the best in the industry execute. Here are some of the best-in-class that are worth a follow:

- __Digital Ocean__ - Regardless of industry Digital Ocean has one of the most impressive [content machines](https://www.digitalocean.com/community). They consistently publish fresh, original content that specifically caters to their audience and is always on-trend. It doesn't hurt that they have an amazing product, but the way they source, create and organize content is top-notch.
- __Basecamp__ - the company has transcended project management software and has become the leader of a no-nonsense business movement. Their founders have [published four books](https://basecamp.com/books) on the topic (one being a national bestseller) and have a high traffic blog that consistently beats the drum of this story which also trickles to their brand and product pages. 
- __LogDNA__ - the log management tool does a great job with content and branding to make B2B feel very approachable and customer focused. Their blogs and [white papers](https://logdna.com/whitepapers/) are very digestible for all types of customer personas. They also have a public Slack channel which adds a great layer of trust to potential custmers.  
- __New Relic__ - the company uses their large content library to power their wide-reaching advertising campaigns and target large enterprise companies. Take a peek at [their website’s](https://newrelic.com/) footer and you'll find answers to every possible question an end-users, manager or CTO might have before agreeing to a contract. 

## What next

So you've spent a few weeks creating great content you think potential users will love. Now what? Here are a few things you can start with:

- __Let SEO do its thing__ - The more content you create, the better your existing content will rank. This process typically plays out over several months, but you should start seeing consistent gains in organic search traffic
- __Start small with advertising__ - The great added benefit of creating a library of content is that you can use the content for advertising assets on Facebook, Google, Twitter and Reddit. Ads using helpful content tend to perform much better than those screaming BUY NOW and act as a great introduction to your brand. Even starting with a small budget can be useful for baselining content performance and guiding future content creation.
- __Partner with a marketplace__ - adding your service to a marketplace like Manifold is a great way to get instant distribution. Marketplaces have established marketing muscle that you can leverage to help spread the word to entirely new audiences.
- __Syndicate__ - A helpful rule of thumb is that you should spend 50% of your time creating your content and 50% promoting. That means posting on social networks, Reddit, hackernews and reaching out to friends that can help spread the word. If you mention complementary products in your content make sure to tag them or ask if they would be willing to share the post as well. Also, emailing new content to leads or free users is a great way to re-warm them to your product.

The benefit of investing in content marketing is that it has compound returns. Start today and start seeing the results grow month-over-month. As the adage goes, the best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is now.



Every company’s goals simplify down to one or more of the following three things for creating value: enhancing user growth, increasing revenue, or decreasing costs. A feasible method for achieving all of these exists by listing your developer service in a marketplace. 

Marketplaces are a unique distribution opportunity as the platform nature of their business enables companies to focus on their core competencies while leveraging powerful network effects, underlying marketplace infrastructure, and gaining insights from data. Companies selling SaaS products to developers should consider selling their products in a marketplace to reach more developers and take their business to the next level.

# Problems you face selling direct

The developer services landscape is rapidly growing as the adoption of the cloud is accelerating across all industries. Each day there are new services targeted towards developers showcased on sites like Product Hunt and Hacker News, giving developers an exploding number of options while making it harder and more expensive for vendors to stand out. 

Further, each service vendor has to convince developers to integrate their product into their stacks making it a barrier to entry for the adoption of their services. This all results in slowed growth, lost sales, and decreased margins for developer services vendors. Fortunately, there is a distribution strategy that can negate these issues - list in a marketplace. 

# Marketplaces position you for success

Before diving deep into the powerful impacts that selling your product through a marketplace could have on your developer services business, it is imperative to understand the objectives marketplace operators are trying to achieve. 

The primary goal of a marketplace is to enable interactions between buyers and sellers– an active, healthy ecosystem of engaging parties that result in powerful network effects. Network effects are a significant force in marketplace ecosystems. They occur when a critical mass of buyers and sellers engage on a platform, resulting in additional participants coming to engage on the platform and enhanced liquidity in the marketplace.

In order to achieve this goal, marketplace operators have to build both a buy side and sell side on the marketplace which is no easy task. To accomplish this, the marketplace must add value that will drive network effects by encouraging participants to actively engage on the platform. As Manifold has a revenue-sharing business model, our success is entirely dependent on vendors being able to successfully reach the right audience of buyers. 

# The competitive advantage you gain with Manifold

Numerous advantages can come from listing your product on a marketplace if you know how to get the most out of it. The best way to take advantage of a marketplace is to leverage the inherent economies of scale and benefit from the value added functionality offered by marketplaces.

Take advantage of underlying marketplace infrastructure to save costs, as this infrastructure represents the product you don’t have to build and maintain. For example, at Manifold, service providers can leverage our [flexible, robust billing engine](https://www.manifold.co/blog/flexible-billing-the-dragon-85d39a17f5f9) as well as our underlying provisioning, and identity and authentication infrastructure. This enables vendors on the marketplace to focus on their core product and not have to worry about spending precious cash on building and maintaining additional features and functionality. 

A major value proposition of marketplaces that can be taken advantage of by vendors is the fact that they simplify the discovery of offerings. This has major economic benefits for both sides of the marketplace as it lowers search costs for developers, while simultaneously lowering distribution and customer acquisition costs for vendors and bringing the potential for faster growth and increased sales from more prospective customers seeing the listings. 

Streamlined discovery is extremely important in the developer services ecosystem. When developing modern applications, one service rarely stands alone and it can be extremely difficult to differentiate and reach the community your product can bring the most value to. Being listed in a marketplace next to complementary services that have brand recognition or traction in specific communities presents a massive opportunity to build awareness faster than otherwise would have been possible. 

Manifold aims to help listed vendors take full advantage of this opportunity and amplify their messaging by leveraging the benefits of marketing economies of scale. Manifold seeks to work with vendors to create engaging content that showcases multiple offerings on the marketplace, with the goal of educating and inspiring developers to try new products.

# Start selling your service through Manifold

Listing on a marketplace presents a unique opportunity for developer services companies and is a great distribution strategy. Marketplaces add value to developer services companies by allowing them to leverage their underlying infrastructure to save costs as well as build awareness and increase the prospective user base by enabling them to reach a large and diverse audience of prospective customers.

Manifold enables developers to easily discover, buy and manage the best services for their applications, while allowing vendors to leverage our underlying infrastructure and marketing reach.

If you’re interested in becoming a service vendor on Manifold, read more and connect with us on [our partners page](https://www.manifold.co/partners)!

Announcing Marketplace-as-a-Service for Developer Platforms

Featured Articles

Maximizing your product’s conversion rate

6 Ways You Should Be Marketing Your API to Developers

Marketplaces make it easy to add new features and extend your reach

All Articles

Benefits of being a Manifold Service Provider

Pika/Pack and the Future of Front-end Development

Announcing Marketplace-as-a-Service for Developer Platforms

Achieving Hockey Stick User Growth: OAuth2 Can Help

Your Image Processing System is How Hackers Will Attack Your Company

Maximizing your product’s conversion rate

An introduction to the Manifold co-marketing program

6 Ways You Should Be Marketing Your API to Developers

Marketplaces make it easy to add new features and extend your reach

Building Better ReasonML APIs with Chainable Functions

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