Is a product which requires integration doomed to fail?
My current side project is a SaaS platform targeting small software-product startups. The platform requires the user to "connect" their server before they can use it. Think webhooks. This is core to how the product works.
The challenge I'm having is it's not a turn-key solution. It requires some coding effort on behalf of the customer before they get value from the product. I'm trying to mitigate this friction by having really good documentation.
Does anyone know of successful SaaS businesses where the product is completely unusable until the customer integrates with their backend?
No, a product that requires implementation isn't doomed to fail!
It can actually be a really good thing for retention - I have a similar barrier in my product (users have to embed our code on their website to see any benefit). Once they've gone through that pain once, they're not going to easily change to another provider.
There are various things you can do to mitigate this problem, eg:
But hard to say more without knowing more about your product :)
Take inspiration from stripe. Yes, you need to write code to integrate it, but they make it so easy that it's a marketing tactic how few lines of code you need to write.
Make it as simple as possible, be upfront about the implementation (even highlight how easy it is), and document it well. you'll be alright.
How technical are your users?
If they are devs then it’s doable, but if they don’t have coding skills it will be more difficult. That might be the case if you are selling into a business.
One possibility is to have an integration / workflow engine in your product. Something visual that the user can see, so that they aren’t just looking at code they don’t understand.
Something like node-RED helps you build workflows. You can then have re-usable components for the integrations.
Folks integrate to stripe and paypal right? if the pain point is strong enough, they will integrate. In the beginning while getting your early customers you can volunteer to do it for free for those without the know how, but you're on the right idea. Good documentation and easy to use API is very important.
Exactly. Integrate it for your clients for free or for a small fee and document process step by step, screen by screen for other same or very similar integrations, maybe separated by code base or platform. After a while you'll have much better FAQ.
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If it requires integration/writing code and your customers are not technical, you could offer integration services as well (or make them part of the package).
It makes it harder but not impossible. I ran my own text marketing Saas platform for many years and we offered API's to send sms. a lot of sales effort was convincing them to switch from another provider to us.
The person you sell to is usually a business owner of some kind, not the techie. And you need to convince the business person that integration is easy and will not take much time from their developer.
Very often the big barrier was the business person saying "oh our developers are maxed-out and won't have time to do this".
At one point I even offered to pay some of them the cost of their developer for 1 day to integrate with us - it got desperate!
So making sure they understand how easy it is is key.
If there is an incumbant provider then ensure your API is very similar to theirs so switching is made easier. Again, one of the things we did was to mirror other provider's API so all the parameters and return codes matched and the only thing they had to do was switch the domain name.
And as @harvellocapello says, once they are hooked in they will stay with you for many years - for the exact reasons I've given above, i.e. the client can't be bothered moving again.
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