Posts by Alex MacCaw

Versioning APIs is never fun but if you provide a public API it's something you'll almost certainly run up against eventually. At Clearbit we've just started adding breaking changes to our API and have had to start thinking about how we're going to approach versioning. There seems to be a few main approaches that people have tried: Use the URL This is a fairly straightforward solution - simply add an incrementing version number in the URL and route different API versions to different endpoints

We're often seeing new and inventive ways our customers are using our APIs, and one that got us particularly excited was Svbtle's [https://svbtle.com] signup. As soon as you've entered your email in Svbtle's registration form they make a request to Clearbit's Person API [https://clearbit.com/docs#person-api], look up the email, and use the returned information to populate the rest of the form. Go ahead and give it a shot [https://svbtle.com/signup]! This is a pretty neat way of reducing signup

As more companies turn to freemium and self-service business models, servicing inbound leads is becoming increasingly problematic. Segmenting leads and making sure your company reaches out to qualified customers is an important part of converting them, but with hundreds or thousands of daily inbound leads doing research manually can become a massive time sink. We are building a set of business intelligence APIs [https://clearbit.com/docs] to help research and qualify leads, amongst other use c

If your business has an inbound sales process then you're probably measuring the quality of leads. Knowing how important a lead is helps with prioritizing followups effectively. Proactively reaching out to valuable leads and giving them the white-gloves treatment can also help conversion. At Clearbit we have a system that scores incoming leads based on our data, and sends us an email alert when a high value lead, such as a company that's raised money, signs up. Today I want to release the libr

I'm excited to share another raft of Clearbit features that we've shipped over the last week. Node bindings Along with our Ruby bindings [https://rubygems.org/gems/clearbit] for Clearbit, we now have Node bindings [https://www.npmjs.org/package/clearbit]. These use a promise based API to asynchronously lookup people and companies via Clearbit. You can see an example of how to use the API below. var clearbit = require('clearbit')('API_KEY'); var Person = clearbit.Person; Person.find({email: