# Basic Integration Strategies for Your SaaS Business Channel: Rob Walling Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dK74TamkaZ4 Duration: 11 min Language: English Words: 1631 Transcript page: https://viewrankai.com/tools/youtube-transcript/dK74TamkaZ4 --- [0:00] [Music] [Music] all right thank you I'm Adam I it's my second microcon I was here last year representing zapier and this year I'm here representing myself I and I helped developer focus companies better create content for their audience and that means lots of work and api's and lots with integrations and thank you all for choosing this talk it's clear that everybody loves integrations but not the way that everybody loved ramon's has anyone watched that show before I've seen a lot of episodes I'm not sure anyone in that family actually loved word a love drayman's but your users love integrations like this they send things that say please integrate with [0:57] Constant Contact please hurry and if you have a public place where you have feature requests they put integrations there they comment they up vote they send you emails that say MailChimp convertkit drip Aweber and on and on and that's just for the email services so it can be overwhelming to have to figure out how to respond to these integrations and so I'm gonna hopefully help a little bit with that today I with these three things we're gonna talk about building blocks of your integrations and wanting to know those well what the heck is I pass and why and how can you it right and then it's gonna be fun we're gonna [1:36] spy on your users a little bit so I thought we'd start with number one because that's the order that the slides are in so i if you have used zapier or if before the way they organize integrations is through triggers and actions so triggers is new data that is available in your service and actions is taking that data in and so you want to figure out that granular level of how your integrations work even when you're building native integrations and you want to figure out what your balance is are you more like a type form that has a single trigger which is new forms that are filled out are you more like [2:20] SendGrid where the primary use case is to sin an email so that's new data coming in or are you like pipedrive where you have a whole bunch of ways that you're creating new data and a whole bunch of corresponding ways that the data comes in and once you have these these bits these granular pieces and the you know your mix then you have a vocabulary you can use with your customers and you can find out what they actually mean so Zendesk could go and create this Constant Contact integration and not actually solve this person's burning problem because this person doesn't actually say what they want the [3:03] integration to do so you need to be able to use those bits the triggers the actions whatever you want to call them to be able to figure out what users actually want and every integration that you build is going to be able to be plotted on this continuum somewhere all the way from opinion it does one thing exactly that use case that you know users want all the way to rebuilding zapier on the other side and you don't want to do that and you don't want to you want to land somewhere in the middle on there but speaking of zapier iPass means integration platform as a service [3:43] it's one of those Gartner analysts terms but what that actually means is zapier an IFFT and I guess there are a handful of others too but that takes too long to say so we say I pass the number one mistake I have seen people make in integrating with zapier is treating it like a checkbox you get your integration done as quickly as you can you put it out there you put this one item on your integration directory that says zapier and you move on leaving all of the potential value of all the things that that integrates with out of your your integration but to get that could mean [4:27] some additional work you might have to make some changes to your API zapier might tell you that there's someone who who zapier told they had to make a lot of changes to their API and when you hear that it's actually if it's something that will help zabi or an eft better integrate it's going to help anyone who integrates with your api also do it better and you may have heard api's compared to legos before where you get to have the pieces and you put them together and you build something new but also like Legos they can end up scattered on the floor and then you step on them and it really [5:08] hurts and one of those ways is when you have someone who continues to poll you and says is there new data is there new data and so of course we have a solution for that which is a web hook which is something that you send whenever there is new data and I this gets a little bit technical and you can go there's a post on the zapier engineering blog that I wrote that goes through the best practices but the gist is you create an API for your web hook so those can be created automatically and then you're able to easily get connected to I pass --is and anyone else and this by the way [5:50] is the way stripe does it the way a lot of a lot of the players do it so also when you're launching on and I pass you create these templates on zapier it's the Zap template you have to have eight to launch dokie had ten they went above and beyond I you want to have as many as you possibly can and I know the micro comm crowd not one to do the bare minimum so add as many of those pieces of flair that you can because each of those is a use case and you might connect that use case to a customer and when you do and they're able to use an [6:30] integration as we've seen from fresh books and many others over the years they become customers more likely to become customers more likely to stay customers so when you do these integrations a lot of times you'll focus on that top one launch week you're you're out you've checked the box but think about the ways you could use it in an ongoing basis your help documents you could create one for all of the integrations including the ones that are made possible by the iPass I integrate into your onboarding so that's you're always trying to pull users into these use cases that you support through integrations and then each of those integrations is probably [7:14] multiple potential blog posts where you write about the problems and you write about how you're able to solve those use cases so I know what 10-minute talk probably shouldn't have an intermission but it's micro comp and I wanted to tell a really bad joke so do you know why integrations are so addictive you get web hooked [7:45] alright number three we're gonna spy on users this is where it gets fun we'll do it in a gdpr compliant way I by the way this spying is not meant to take the place of customer conversations that you have where you get on a Google hangout and then you turn off the video because the quality is bad and you have a phone call instead what we're looking to do is to expose your integrations in a way that allows your users to find them and then see which ones they're interested in so create an integrations directory with everything the things that you have built natively the things that are [8:31] exposed to be a partners and make it searchable and then this is important actually look at what people search for look at what people select and then you'll know where you can go deeper to maybe create a native integration or do more Co marketing to be able to go to the ones that your users actually care about this directory is I built by API deck which is a startup that pulls in zapier and IFFT and others automatically if you're already integrated with zapier there's a partner API that lets you pull down all those all the different apps that are supported and then if you have people integrating directly with you you [9:18] can use something like open channel which is an app store as a service and when you have this list of all these integrations then you can create individual landing pages where you actually talk about the solution that it has like web merge is done with all of the stuff that's that they get via zap urines others indirect integrations and so they've created all of these and then they're able to see what do people find via search what do they find I when they're using web merge so I know that was a lot of things I'm hoping you come away with figuring out the building blocks of your own [10:01] integrations making sure you extract as much value as you can from the eye paths integrations that you have created and then also look to your users to figure out what they're interested in by telling them all of the things that you do have available and if you want to talk more about integrations I set this up every developer comm slash integrations I'll email you the two jokes I didn't use you're guaranteed to be worse [10:38] [Applause] --- About this 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