Most developers decide whether to use your API in the first ten minutes. If they can make a successful call in that time, they keep going. If they get lost in authentication, hunt for a base URL or hit an unexplained error, they close the tab.

A good getting started guide is the single page that prevents that. This post shows how to write one, section by section, and how to publish it next to your API reference so developers never have to switch tabs.

What a getting started guide is for

It has one job: get a new developer from zero to a working request, fast. It is not the place to explain every endpoint. That is what the API reference is for. Think of the guide as the shortest path through your API, and the reference as the full map.

The measure of success is time to first successful call. Everything you write should reduce it.

The structure that works

1. Say what the API does, in two sentences

Open with what developers can build and who it is for.…