An API’s greatest ally is its documentation. If the documentation is impossible to read, you’ll lose customers. API doumentation needs to be straightforward, provide simple examples and needs to anticipate what information developers are going to need. 

We try to make sure that our documentation follows all of the rules above. (Perhaps I’m so attuned to this because I’m reworking the documentation on PhaxCodes.)  But, for every developer that reads our documentation, there’s another that skips the “Docs” button and  just send us emails asking questions that are answered outright in our documentation. 

As an example, we were just asked if you could get a PDF of a received fax sent to a webserver. About five seconds in our documentation leads you to:

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Receive fax callback

When a fax is received, Phaxio will post information about the fax (including any metadata received from PhaxCodes) along with a PDF of the fax to your receive fax callback URL, if you have specified one.

Request Parameters

Name	Type	Description
is_test	boolean	Is this callback as a result of a test call?
direction	string	The direction of the fax (in this case, 'received'). Useful if you use the same callback URL for both sent and receive confirmations.
fax	Fax Object	The job's fax object.
metadata	string	The metadata associated with the PhaxCode that you specified.

If you can’t find the answer in the documentation or if you’re a bit confused, then by all means, please send us an email; we want to get you the answer you need. Please, for startup founders everywhere, go through the documentation first.