Ideating around integrations development | Isaac's Blog
Hi everyone, this is my first time writing on the internet, and I wanted to share some of the ideas that I have explored over the past few months at Entrepreneur First. I hope that other entrepreneurs can find my learnings useful as a jumping off point for their own ideas.
In this post, I'll describe my ideation around tooling to enable developers to build better integrations, and an overview of the market landscape.
Improving "Integrations" development has been the burning problem for me, and was the start point for my current entrepreneurial path.
First of all, what is an integration? I'm defining an integration as a connection between your system and an external system in order to transfer information. Let's imagine that you are building a financial operations SaaS. Your application allows customers to connect their bank accounts, pulling in transaction data on a periodic basis so that they can better understand their spend. This can be really useful for customers that have data spread across multiple bank accounts. In this case, an integration needs to be developed to connect the SaaS application to a bank data aggregator like Plaid.
Once a startup moves beyond the stage where the product and relevant integrations to satisfy their beachhead market are covered, scaling the business necessarily requires adding new integrations. I noticed that more than 50% of a B2B startup's engineering resource are spent developing and maintaining integrations. This feels like a distraction from working on the core product, and what differentiates your businesses. As Bezos put it, “Focus on the things that make your beer taste better".
