Shipped a public API and docs site in four weeks.

The story

Fieldnotes had spent eight months building a project management tool that developers loved. Their waiting list had 12,000 signups, and the beta was growing fast. But they had no public API, which meant no integrations, no ecosystem, and no path to becoming a platform. Their customers were asking for API access in every feedback channel. The founding team had the backend skills to build it themselves but could not justify pulling engineering resources away from the core product for what they estimated would be a three-month project.

We compressed the timeline from three months to four weeks by building on proven, boring infrastructure instead of designing everything from scratch.

Week one was API design: we worked with the Fieldnotes team to define endpoints, authentication, rate limits, and webhook contracts based on what their beta users actually needed. Weeks two and three were implementation: we built the REST API with OAuth 2.0 authentication, pagination, filtering, and webhook delivery on top of their existing data layer. Week four was the developer portal: interactive documentation with try-it-out endpoints, code samples in six languages, and a changelog.

The API launched with 28 days of elapsed time. Developer signups hit 3,400 in the first 90 days. API uptime has held at 99.98 percent. The Fieldnotes team now maintains the API and docs themselves using the patterns and tooling we established.