Running a Local Food Business on APIs

About this paper

This is the first of a new kind of API Evangelist paper — a bundle: the paper you read, clipped to a single machine-readable APIs.json artifact that ships alongside it. The paper is the argument; the artifact is the operation, described — the actual services, the actual operations within them, and the actual workflows that stitch them together, as one file you can fork and run.

The subject is deliberately small and real: a local food producer selling three ways — at the market, online, and wholesale. An operation is a set of capabilities, and every capability worth having is an API. This bundle names the functional areas a food business runs on, curates eight services with only the operations each business actually calls (carried inline, not as links that rot), and describes the common multi-step tasks as Arazzo workflows — the ones inside a single service, and the more valuable ones across services, kept in a shared commons. It makes the case for owning that description in your own repo instead of renting it inside a connector, is honest about what stays hard, and shows why an operation described this way is one a capable assistant can actually help you run.

What's inside

1. The operation, in plain words — the functional areas a food business runs on
2. Only the services you need — and only the parts you need
3. The stack, service by service — Square, Stripe, QuickBooks, Shopify, Mailchimp, Uber Direct, USDA Local Food, farmOS
4. The workflows inside a single service
5. The workflows across services — the commons
6. The bundle as an artifact — APIs.json, inline data, api vs common
7. Getting in — an onboarding descriptor for every service in the stack
8. Own it — the local-first case
9. The honest hard parts — auth, the money math, volume, it's still a food business
10. Anti-patterns worth watching for
11. Where this is going — an operation an agent can help run
12. Operator self-assessment

What you get for $25.00