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SaaS Builders, can we talk about integrations?

I'm working through some ideas for products that help SaaS founders and developers connect their product to the millions of products out there on the internet. It's core to the original promise of the web, and I always think of the William Gibson quote, "The street finds its own uses for things". By allowing your customers to integrate your product with others, they will come up with entirely new ideas that you may have never thought of! Letting your customers extend your product through webhooks and integrations also gives you insight into how their using it.

I'm looking for SaaS founders and builders that would be willing to have a quick chat about webhooks, integrations - whether you've already built the features, whether you're thinking about it, or even if you've already dismissed the idea - I'd love to know why, what you did, and where it should have been easier!

If you're not building a product, but still have thoughts about this, I'd love to hear from you as well!

I'd be happy to buy you a coffee for your time!

If you're interested, please pick a time that works for you on my SavvyCal:

https://savvycal.com/whooky/chat

Or, if you want to share your ideas publicly, let's discuss here!

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    I've had a few chats with people, and it has been great! Looking for more, so if you've added webhooks, Zapier integrations, Integromat, or anything else into your SaaS, or are thinking about doing it, I'd love to pick your brain about how it went, and what could have been better!

    Also, in the conversations I've had, I've been pointed more towards looking at no-code integrations - so if you've built or are building something using a no-code tool but are hitting walls trying to connect to something else, I'd love to talk about that too, and maybe I can help get you past the wall!

    1. 1

      Hey Edward, sound like an interesting idea. I find current service rather intuitive and straightforward, so I wonder what aspect of webhook or api integration that you're trying to improve?

  2. 1

    Where can I follow your journey on this project?

    1. 1

      While I hadn't planned on doing the full-on transparency "build in public" thing, I do plan on talking about the process here and on Microconf connect.

      So give me a follow, or follow the product https://www.indiehackers.com/product/whooky-io

      Thanks!

      Ed

  3. 1

    I think I'm interested in this area, but I'm not quite sure I understand what it is from your description. Can you give some examples of a product that gets extended via webhooks and integrations? Do you mean APIs?

    1. 1

      @louisbarclay - that's a great question! I did kind of gloss over that in my question, didn't I?

      In any web application, there are all sorts of events that happen - the most common ones being when things are created or updated when your users use your app, and any of these events could be candidates for allowing your users to subscribe to receive a webhook when they happen.

      A good starting point for thinking about it is, if there's anything that happens in you app that you'd consider sending an email or SMS when it does - that's a great candidate for a webhook. If your customers want to receive an email they may want to receive a message in a slack channel, or have a row added to an Airtable, or whatever else they might think of.

      In, say a blog community platform, where there are creators and subscribers, there are events like:

      From the creator standpoint:

      • I have a new subscriber, I lost a subscriber, etc.
      • I have a new comment on a post
      • A post has been shared to wherever
      • (and so on..)

      From a subscriber standpoint:

      • A blog I subscribe to has a new post
      • There's a new blog (on the platform) about a subject I like that I might want to subscribe to
      • (and so on..)

      So, as the platform owner, providing the capability for the creators and the subscribers to be able to connect those events to other SaaS products increases their interaction with your platform, and increases the utility and the stickyness of your platform.

      It's often said that webhooks are a "reverse api" and do go hand-in-hand with a customer-accessible api - the webhooks are there to notify external systems that an event happened, and then the external system could connect to the api to gather additional data it might need.

      In the case of Cloak.ist, are there things that happen on the platform that you can imagine your customers might want be able to trigger something on another platform? I imagine there might be things around traffic events or especially around monitoring ("The 'url-before' platform is down").

      1. 1

        Aha, interesting

        Yes - if I became more enterprise-y, or started offering custom domain as a feature to SaaS companies (like https://servr.app/?ref=producthunt) I could see the need for this

        Even now, maybe it would be useful to have a webhook to inform a customer that their DNS records propagated and their site is now live - but to be honest, I reckon I'd just do that with a serverless function

        So maybe for now I'm not your best person to talk to. Really appreciate this elucidation, makes me excited for what you might build!

        (If you do want to talk about it though, I'd be game!)

        1. 1

          Yeah, if you only have a couple of events, and if those events don't happen very often (even with hundreds or thousands of customers), and deliverability/reliability isn't critical, then that's a great way to go about it.

          1. 1

            OK cool - that's reassuring to hear!

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