Snowpal APIs to save time, money and effort
Published: 2024-01-02 20:43:04

In this conversation, Krish from Snowpal introduces their backend as a service APIs and explains how they can help companies reduce time to market for applications. He highlights the versatility of their APIs, which can be used across various industries and for different types of problems. Krish emphasizes the importance of focusing on core customer problems and not spending unnecessary time and resources on building backend systems. He shares Snowpal’s journey and how they developed their APIs to solve their own challenges. Krish also provides an overview of specific APIs and discusses the benefits of leveraging Snowpal’s services for quick and efficient solutions.


![Image description](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/nn1abpcrhfslsiueu1o6.png)

## Takeaways
Snowpal provides backend as a service APIs to help companies reduce time to market for applications.

Their APIs are versatile and can be used across various industries and for different types of problems.

Focusing on core customer problems is crucial, and Snowpal’s APIs allow companies to avoid spending unnecessary time and resources on building backend systems.

By leveraging Snowpal’s APIs, companies can quickly and efficiently build solutions and bring them to market.

## Chapters
00:00 Introduction and Overview

01:26 APIs for Various Industries and Problems

04:04 Snowpal’s Building Block APIs

05:01 Focus on Core Customer Problems

06:26 The Importance of Backend Systems

07:25 Snowpal’s Journey and Solution

08:22 Exploring Specific APIs

09:49 Leveraging APIs for Quick Solutions

10:46 Customizing APIs for Different Domains

12:40 Understanding API Terminology

14:22 Getting Started with Snowpal APIs

16:17 Exploring Documentation and Resources

17:40 Purchasing Snowpal APIs

19:03 Building Solutions with Snowpal APIs

20:27 Understanding the Access Control API

23:43 Simplifying Complex Problems with APIs

24:11 Summary and Closure

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## Transcript
Krish (saas.snowpal.com) (00:00.918)

Hey there, hope you’re doing well. Wish you all a very happy New Year 2024. At Snowpal, we provide backend as a service APIs to help companies reduce time to market for applications. We provide a number of APIs. I’m gonna share some of them with you. So as you kick off this year and start building your next feature, your next enhancement or your next application, whatever it is that you’re doing, if you find that you’re actually spending time, energy, effort, money,

and a lot more on the backend, then to building your backend systems, then it’s likely that you’re probably doing something with all due respect that you probably don’t have to do, or you might actually be better off not doing. And I’m gonna explain why. I’m gonna take an example and sort of walk you through it, maybe in this video or in the subsequent videos, but it should suffice to say that when you’re solving a problem,

whether it’s building an internal solution, or you’re building something for end users, you’re building a mobile app, you’re building a web application, maybe you’re building your next microservice, building something for the pharmaceutical industry, you’re building something for the fintech industry, maybe you’re building something for the restaurant industry. I’ve said a number of things here, right? Different clients, meaning mobile, web, and microservices and whatnot, different industries, so it’s across domains.

and different types of problems altogether. And also, I mentioned internal versus external end user phasing applications. So it doesn’t matter what it is that you’re doing. It’s highly likely that our APIs will actually take you almost all the way there, or at least most of the way there. So you don’t have to worry about staffing, recruiting, hiring, training, developing, designing, architecting, implementing, testing.

deploying, scaling, managing in your back end systems. So you can either leverage your APIs as our SaaS products and literally pay by paper request or pick one of the many plans we support. Or if you choose to license our APIs, you’re welcome to do that as well. We provide, we support multiple models. You can license, purchase commercial licenses for one of the APIs.

Krish (saas.snowpal.com) (02:23.438)

for two of our APIs or all of our APIs. It’s entirely up to you. Our APIs are built in design so they can work. They do work independently of each other, but collectively they solve more of your problems, right? So it’s literally, it’s up to you. So let me do a screen share and show you some of this here.

Krish (saas.snowpal.com) (02:49.346)

take a second. Let me actually.

share again.

Krish (saas.snowpal.com) (03:03.594)

OK, sorry, it took a little bit of time there. OK. So if you just go to saas.snowpal.com, it’s going to redirect you to deve This could pretty much be your starting point till you get acclimated to our solutions. But once you do get acclimated, then there are a number of other supporting documentation pages that you could actually.

to start from. So again, saas.snowpal.com takes you to deve Here, we’re going to keep enriching our documentation. So it’s going to look a little different every time we show up here with more examples and more references. But this is a good place to start. This page is not too long. As you can see, it’s pretty short. But it gives you a breakdown of all of our APIs.

A number of these APIs called building blocks APIs, project management API, content management, classroom, conversation, status management API, custom attribution API, access control API, and the list goes on and there’s thousands of end points. So the idea here is when you’re trying, when you’re starting to build a new solution or enhance an existing solution, you can actually focus on your core customer problems, whatever those problems are.

My example that I give a lot of people is if you’re trying to sell a pizza, you’re trying to differentiate yourself from somebody else who’s also selling, or has been selling pizzas a long time, you’re trying to, I mean, I’m not a restaurateur, but I can, I reckon you’re going to try to distinguish yourselves by making a better pizza. Maybe the dough is different, maybe the toppings are different, the niche is different, the market you’re selling to is different.

But what you don’t want to spend your time and energies on, I would, a positive is, at least initially when you get started, or perhaps till the end of time, till eternity, on setting up your tables, hiring your chef, getting licenses to run your restaurant, walking your guests into your dining area, for instance, seating them.

Krish (saas.snowpal.com) (05:30.91)

All of those things are important. I don’t deny it, but they do not prove, they’re not your unique selling proposition. Maybe some of it is, maybe most of it is, maybe none of it is, right? It just depends on what you’re doing. But what you’re trying to do is you’re trying to sell a better pizza. So if you wanna go to market, take your solutions to market sooner, you have to focus on actually baking the pizza. That’s…

the most important thing. It’s not the, probably the only important thing I would say, right? How can you do that? Because I can tell you when we built our first application a few years ago, which is snowpal.com, which is a project management platform that provides a number of features and everything you can typically expect from a project management platform, right? Kanban, schedulers and due dates and deadlines and checklists and whatnot. Now the thing is,

When we built this, it took us a fair bit of time, as agile and nimble and quick as we are as engineers at Snowpal, it took us longer than I have to say that we wanted to spend getting this out there because we didn’t have the fundamental APIs available. So we had to build our own APIs, then build our user interface, then build our mobile applications and so on and so forth. If we had those APIs available to us, I guarantee you we would have shipped this application.

even sooner than we actually did. By virtue of the challenges that we personally ran into, when we built our own solutions, we realized it’s gonna actually help other people if these or such APIs were available. That was literally what set the groundwork and the foundation for us to focus our energies in the last six to 12 months on building and publishing these APIs.

So imagine, right, if you had to build this application, again, it’s got a large number of features. I mean, I don’t want to run through it. That’s not the purpose of this video, but you can check this out at your leisure. You can go through this and see, you can manage your projects ultimately using our project management platform. Now, to get all of this working, we had to do a number of different things, but the one thing that we would have not wanted to do, if we had a choice,

Krish (saas.snowpal.com) (07:53.182)

was not spend time building the back end system. Because a lot of it can actually be genericized to supporting the features that we support. The features are unique. The problems that we are solving, at least we’re solving it differently from other project management solutions. But that doesn’t mean the APIs and the endpoints themselves need to be unique. That’s the gist of it. Now, without further ado, at least, let me go here. And let’s say.

We have specific APIs, like for building Snowpal, we could have started with the project management API. So if I go to project mana and you’ll see the Postman collection here, it’s got a large number of endpoints. And I’m not gonna walk through these endpoints in this video, I just wanna kick this off, essentially I’m gonna do a whole, we’re gonna do a series of videos where we explain this to you, socialize our value add and make it…

very obvious to you as a developer, as a startup, as a mid-sized company or a large organization that you probably can be solving your problems differently from how you have been doing in the past. And then given the advent of AI, a lot of us want to do less than what we actually would have done in the past. So if you mix, take our APIs and we actually starting to work on AI APIs as well, but we haven’t launched them yet, so I’m not gonna jump the gun. If you’re gonna take the existing APIs,

alongside low code, no code, and other solutions, and any AI integrations that you might already have, if not you’re working towards having, you’re actually gonna be able to build solutions in really, really quick time. And that’s the idea, you know, that’s our hope is that you leverage our services and make yourself, you know, satisfy your needs, whether you’re a managed services provider that’s building solutions for other clients, or if you’re the client yourself.

It’s actually building products and you have end users, whether you’re a B2C or a B2B provider, it doesn’t really matter. These APIs will hold you in good stead. So if you’re building a project management solution, you could use the project management API. If you’re building a content management solution, you could use a content management API. But again, we have something called the building blocks API. So if I go to building blocks, api.snowpal.com, you’ll see a number of…

Krish (saas.snowpal.com) (10:17.842)

again, a large number of endpoints, which literally can be mapped to any domain, so to speak. Now, again, I’m going to mention, go through all of them, like I said a couple of times already in this video, but I at least want to say that it does not matter whether you’re building, you know, we are in an election year, you’re building a solution that, you know, I don’t know, you know, as a candidate, possibly.

You want to be able to, I’m just throwing out some random examples here. You want to understand what your community needs, and you want to try to sort of focus your campaign around the core issues of your community. You want to build an app, whatever that app ends up needing to do. You can worry about the user interface, the client, whether you want to do a mobile app, likely it’s going to be mobile, maybe you’re doing web as well. But what you don’t want to do is actually worry about

the facilitating and designing and implementing server-side solutions. Because while this does not have any references to campaign, all that you have to do is do the mapping between our terminologies, our product terminologies, and your business problems. So we have something called a key, which is like a project view, or a space, or a problem, whatever it is, right? Those are all synonymous.

you could create a key called a campaign, right? You could basically expose your interfaces to the end user calling it your own campaign. But internally, when you actually map and integrate our APIs, you would call a get keys or an add key endpoint because you’re adding a key, right? So you’re gonna say gateway.snowpal.com slash keys, post request and you’re adding a key. But what the key means in our…

how the key is exposed to your end user is going to be as a campaign, for instance, right? Just a very simple example. And now within a key, we have a construct called blocks. You’re breaking a problem down into manageable blocks. So when you have a campaign, again, I have no clue about politics, but let’s say you have to break down, let’s say you’re running for office in a certain region or locality, and there’s many neighborhoods.

Krish (saas.snowpal.com) (12:40.106)

Maybe each block could be a neighborhood because you need to go campaign and find out the problems of your constituents in that neighborhood, for instance. So you could have a block called, I don’t know, morning walk drive or a Sunset Hills drive, for instance. Those could be your blocks. Now, again, to the end user, you’re calling it by community, maybe by the name of the street or the neighborhood. But internally, you map that to a block. Like your user interface,

Your UI team is going to say create a block, but the block is going to be the name of the community. So those are the types of mappings you have to understand. And we provide professional services if you need help, but it’s pretty much self-service. It’s very self-descriptive. It takes like less than 10 minutes for your dev team or your product team to purchase and get an API key. You can go to multiple places. You can go to aws.snowpal.com, which will take you to the AWS marketplace where we have.

We have all of our APIs published. So you could go, click purchase options. You can pick by pay by request. We support multiple payment models and we adding more into the mix. Or you could go to different API hubs. Like we have another hub that we published. We can go to blobr, blog Can pay by month. You can pick a variety of, from a variety of different plans, one that works best for you. Just start with a free trial. You get like two.

All of our APIs have a free trial. You have two weeks free access. You can make a certain number of requests, check out, get your feedback, ask questions, and then purchase the plans that work best for you. It’s very simple to get started.

I’ve said a number of things, and we’re gonna break this down into, again, like I said earlier, like a series of recordings, so we go through different problems. But if you want us to speak to specific problems that you have, let us know on LinkedIn, send us an email, varun at snowpal.xyz, or krish at snowpal.xyz, or krish at snowpal.com. Doesn’t matter, you know, there’s a number of ways you can reach out to us, or hit us up on LinkedIn, for instance. We will tell you.

Krish (saas.snowpal.com) (14:52.022)

how you can start leveraging our EPIs and save a ton of time, a lot of money, and a lot of headache and get, and feel reassured. Because it’s one thing, you know, just imagine how much time it’s gonna take you as a company to build a simple API, even a simple API, not complex ones like the ones we publish. It’s complex, first implemented, it’s very easy for you to consume it, right? I think it’s one of Einstein’s codes that says, I don’t know if it’s Einstein, I almost start with Einstein because there’s…

plenty of wonderful quotes from Albert Einstein. One of the quotes that says, it’s actually very complex to make things simple. So our hope is, and our intent here is to absorb the complexity. So all that you have to do is do the mapping between your business problems and our APIs and endpoints, and then hit the ground running. And now you can self-learn, which is given our documentation, our examples, references, all the videos, our podcasts.

and all the videos we continue to publish, it probably becomes easy enough for you to understand. It’s gonna take your dev and product teams no time to onboard. With that said, if you do need some assistance, and maybe for a little bit of time to help us onboard you, we are more than happy to do that as well. You can purchase our professional services either on AWS Marketplace, or you can hit us up and we can create a private offer for you. Not a problem.

So I want to, you know, I know how long this initial kickoff video is. We are like about 15 minutes in. So I want to keep this short enough, certainly under 30 minutes, but we are only halfway through that window. So I think I can probably slow down a little bit here and talk, you know, get into some more details, right? To the extent possible. Now I said, go to deve to check out our documentation.

Let me walk you through some of those steps. If getting started, it says picking an API hub. Like it says, okay, what are some things you need to do to onboard? Now we have AWS Marketplace, and then we have a blobr.snowpal.com couple of hubs. We are on other hubs as well, but if you would like for us to be on a certain API hub, for whatever reason, you’re consuming other APIs on that hub, and you’d rather, you know, from a billing standpoint, you’d prefer that we hop on that.

Krish (saas.snowpal.com) (17:11.826)

it’s not a big deal, right? Just let us know, we will make it as simple as it possibly can for you. Or you can use one of these existing apps, and I think one third of the world is on AWS. AWS Marketplace is going to only continue to grow from where it is. So it’s very easy to go through those clicks. It’ll literally take five minutes or less for you to hit subscribe, and you’ll get the API. And actually, why don’t we… So let’s see if I go here.

I don’t know, let’s say I want to pick access control API. Because I’m interested in, now again, like I said earlier, you can either build entire systems. I know if I said it, but let me say it. Entire systems ground up using our APIs, which means you don’t even have to have anything on the server side, nothing, none of it. Or you could be a shop that has server side, you have apps on the server, maybe.

for solving different problems. Maybe they are passed through solutions. Maybe they don’t do a whole lot of business problem solving at this point of time. Or you have robust backends, but you need to build something new. You need to extend what you already have. So again, it does not matter where you fit in. Not the size of your company, not the size of your team, not the domain you’re in, not the kind of problems you’re trying to solve your customers, not whether you’re building internal solutions or external solutions.

The APIs that we’ve designed and published are meant to be generic enough, yet have a sense of specificity. And here’s what I mean by that. I showed you content management, project management, classroom APIs. So these are sort of verticals. So we’re continuing to add verticals, but the verticals are built on very generic horizontals. What I mean by that is they’re all building blocks. They give you these little building blocks so you can build.

a huge tower, you can build a small house, you can build a restaurant, you can build a pharmacy, you can build whatever it is that you’re intending to build by picking and choosing what you need. Now, access control is one of these APIs that you can use either in entirety, along with other APIs, or in an isolated manner. Maybe you have other solutions in the backend that you’re integrating or building, your team is building, but you want a pretty robust access control API.

Krish (saas.snowpal.com) (19:31.582)

Now, do you want to design, discuss, with your product teams implement, and run the gamut on doing this? Excuse me. You can. It’s going to take you a fair bit of time and money, and there’s a risk also, right? You want to get to market as soon as you can. So you’re losing valuable time. And there is also risk of, can you meet the deadlines you set yourselves, right? Do you have other things you could work on? Is there other fish you could possibly fry to make the best use of the money you have at hand?

So there’s a variety of reasons. If you look at our access control API, you can just see, I mean, I won’t go through the list of these. There’s a large number of these endpoints, but we support privileges slash permissions, roles, which is a collection of permissions. We support assigning permissions or roles to members, or you can create a team, which is a team has one or more members, and you can grant access.

to resources at certain levels. You can grant access to one or many resources to one or many teams, to one member or the entire team. You can either grant privileges or permissions or you can grant roles, which essentially are bags of privileges or permissions. So, and then we have end points that are very specific. It’ll tell you, hey, does Krish have a certain privilege on this resource?

Does Krish have direct privilege or does Krish have that privilege via a team that Krish happens to be associated with? Maybe the resource has multiple You know a given resource Whatever the resource is for you again. It could be a building could be a restaurant could be a pharmacy it could be a hotel it could be Something in the Finland fintech space it could be something in the education space. It could be a classroom

whatever it is that your resources, you can create those resources, those very resources using another one of our APIs, say a building block API, right? Building blocks API. Or you could use your own resources and just use us for permissioning those resources. So you could say, hey, actually, let me go close building blocks and go to access controls since we’re talking about that. You can ask, does, you know, this particular restaurant or this classroom has 40 students

Krish (saas.snowpal.com) (21:52.994)

three teachers, like one main teacher and the other assistant or teachers who work together. So let’s say there are three teachers and 40 students. There’s different levels of access. You’re going to grant the main teacher versus the other teachers who assist the teacher, primary teacher, and the students. The students are going to have different privileges. They are going to have one, and maybe they have a set of privileges, independent, uniquely picked privileges, or they have roles assigned to them, like a student role, and a student role has n number of privileges.

And these are, by the way, custom privileges and roles that you define. It’s not like we are forcing you to use out of the box roles and privileges. You can create your own custom privileges and roles, assign it to either individual members, in this case, students and teachers, or you can create teams, and you can add members to those teams and grant either roles, sorry, roles or, yep, roles or privileges to those teams.

So it can be as specific and customizable as you want for it to be. And now you use your existing systems if you wanted to, your existing resources, whatever those resources are, you can actually do the ACL part alone, if you choose to, using our ACL API. And just imagine the power it brings to the table. Now you’re not worried about designing these access control systems.

If you’re gonna take three months or six months to build, even if not something as wide as this, I don’t know how many endpoints we actually have on the access control API, let’s look at it. We have like 78 endpoints. And it’s not always the number of endpoints. Some of our APIs have like hundreds of endpoints, some have fewer. The complexity of the endpoint is mutually exclusive from the number of endpoints the API supports. Some of the APIs support a large number of endpoints and solve really complex problems for you.

Other APIs might solve simple enough problems. At least they will make them simple enough for you. So all of the complexities hidden from you. So we’ve talked a little bit about the access control API. I don’t wanna go into more APIs in the very first call. We are on to 20, 23 minutes or so. Let me sort of summarize this and then have a closure on this in this first kickoff video. Let me call it.

Krish (saas.snowpal.com) (24:11.798)

Snowpal back in as a service, APIs, video or podcasts, a one-off end, right? This is the very first one at the top of the new year. So going back here, so we said, how do you go get the key? Again, depending on if you go to the marketplace, you click through a couple of links, I mean, buttons, and then you’re gonna essentially gonna go here. You’re gonna say purchase options, you’re gonna sign in. You probably already signed in if you’re an AWS user and you’re consuming it.

it becomes part of your own consolidated build. It’s very easy to use and pay for, and we are super affordable, right? The prices, the endpoints are like super affordable. So you can either if you purchase them on AWS Marketplace, we’ll send you an email with the product code and the API key. And that’s all you need to start actually hitting those APIs. You’re going to put them on the header on your postman API request. Again, this initial video speaks to product owners, product managers, developers and architects, all of them.

all of you, but the subsequent videos, I’ll probably call out for the role that the podcast might be the best fit for. That way, it speaks a little bit more of your language, if you will. So this one is pretty generic, so I’ve said many different things. You’re going to get the API key and the product code, and you can start making those requests. You can do it through Postman. Just import the run it in Postman. Import the collections.

or start writing some sample scripts. And we also provide SDKs written in Go at this point. There are other SDKs we’re gonna publish. Currently the SDKs are actually in Go language, which is very easy for you to consume and use if you’re a Go shop essentially. Or you can use the REST APIs directly if you wish. Now you get the API in the product code and email if you purchased our APIs on the AWS marketplace. If you purchase them,

on one of the hubs like say blob you get the API key right after you subscribe. All that you have to do is hit subscribe, put your email, they use the free trial and the end of the trial, you just purchase either by month or by the year, and you can continue to using these APIs. And depending on your usage and consumption, you can adjust your purchase plan that makes the most sense for you. As opposed to you spending

Krish (saas.snowpal.com) (26:33.362)

months building this, staffing teams, hiring engineers, developers, product owners, project managers, it’s gonna cost a lot of money, right? It’s not even in the ballpark. It’s not like it’s gonna cost a dollar versus $1.25. It’s like something along the lines of what will cost a dollar through consuming APIs could cost a whole $100 for you if you actually went a different, more traditional route of the past where you actually reinvented the wheel.

which is why we highly recommend that you refrain from doing so in your own best interest. So you purchase the keys, you pick the API hub and then you purchase the API key. We have some videos explaining this. We have more, we’re adding into the mix. You can find these by going to, you can go to apple.snowpal.com. It’s gonna take you to the Apple Podcast.

or if you’re a Spotify user, just go to Spot We do a lot of technical videos. There’s a number of these collaborative sessions I’ve been doing with other people. Thanks to my guests who hop on these podcasts. So we have a lot of these types of conversations. But you can look at the documentation alongside with the videos, with the…

plenty of things we’re continuing to publish. So I’m saying all of these things really quickly to just keep this initial first video to this 30 minute limited within the 30 minute mark. So apologies that I’m speaking really, really fast and hopefully you’re able to understand what I’m saying despite the accent that it comes with. So I talked about Postman, I talked about AWS Marketplace, about Blogger, the API hubs.

I mentioned the SDKs, I can even go to one of these SDKs, let’s say building blocks, building-blocks-sdk.snowpal.com. It’s gonna take you to the SDK, you can check out the Golang SDK. And you know, if you’re a Golang shop, it’s actually even easier to get the API key and start using the SDK. But if you’re not a Golang shop, you can just leverage the APIs directly, you know, from a restful standpoint.

Krish (saas.snowpal.com) (28:52.546)

tutorials and we’re also, you know, you can also go to snowpals. I’m forgetting we have a lot of documentation on Medium, on LinkedIn, on a number of other platforms. Recently, we also started publishing, let’s actually take you to Medium first. So we go to Medium, you’ll see a number of articles, right? Number of articles will point you to podcasts, some articles published directly on Medium as well. So definitely check.

those articles out as well. And you know, if you have specific questions, let’s say you might say Krish, I understood all of this, but let me stop the screenshot, right? But actually I have very specific questions because our problem is very unique. Can you help? Can your API’s help? If you have those questions, positive, you are gonna have those questions, despite all the documentation that we’re gonna continue to publish.

So don’t hesitate to reach out to us. We are more than happy to sort of guide you, give you pointers, you know, help you, either through our professional services or just as getting on a quick call, a quick half an hour call, go to cale and then book some time. And we are happy to go over these items. I think we are at the 30 minute mark. So I’m gonna keep my promise and end the recording here. Again, there’s a number of things I socialized. Take your time.

This is video number one. I’ll talk to you soon in the subsequent podcasts and videos. Thanks and wish you all a very happy New Year.