The API-First Pivot: How Entrio’s UI Strategy Accelerated Enterprise Adoption

Enterprise software founders often assume their UI/UX will win customers over. For Entrio, letting go of this assumption unlocked faster adoption in financial institutions.

Initially, Entrio offered only a web application interface. Then came the pivotal customer feedback. “They said that the organization is so accustomed already to a certain UI and UX that they would rather have all of the beautiful things that we can provide, all the data quality, the data maintenance and the data enrichment that we can provide. But it doesn’t have to come through our own UI,” shares Avi Cohen in a recent Category Visionaries episode.

This insight led to a fundamental shift in their product strategy. Instead of trying to replace existing interfaces, they’d enhance them through APIs. As Avi explains, “Let your data make our system more intelligent, but don’t try to force your UX and UI on us because we have people that have already made their life very much accustomed to the bank systems.”

The pivot aligned with a deeper truth about enterprise software adoption: organizations have significant investments in existing systems and user training. “You think about thousands and sometimes tens of thousands of applications running inside the organization, alongside open source, alongside in house development,” Avi notes.

This complexity made their API-first approach particularly valuable. When approaching new customers, they could now say, “We know we’re a startup, we know that you invested a ton of money already in deploying either internal system or the likes of service now and other, that’s okay, we can coexist. It’s not a choice of us or them.”

The strategy worked especially well because it addressed a key challenge in their market. Banks were struggling with technology sprawl – one institution had “20 different local no code solutions internally.” Rather than adding another interface to this mix, Entrio could make existing interfaces smarter.

This approach also accelerated their sales cycles. By minimizing the change management required, they could reduce implementation time and resistance. “The speed of adoption was very quick,” Avi explains. “It’s an immediate ROI because they can see, in a matter of days, they can see their environment that represent their entire vendor stack.”

The lesson for enterprise software founders? Sometimes the best UI strategy is letting customers keep their existing interfaces. By focusing on delivering value through APIs rather than new interfaces, you can reduce adoption friction and accelerate time to value.

This doesn’t mean abandoning UI innovation entirely. Rather, it means being flexible about how you deliver value. As Avi puts it, “If you want to keep your current UIs and UX from whatever system you’re using, let Entrio make your system just more intelligent and let us feed our data into this.”