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Below is our weekly newsletter, largely just me writing out my thoughts and whatever catches my attention or is on the top of my mind. Please reply and let's talk about whatever catches your attention. Okay cool. Let’s rock. On a personal note...Aloha from the beach! I’ve been working with a business and personal coach for the first time in my adult life since January. He’s great. One of the first things we did was use his family “business planning” approach (with videos, worksheets, and easy to use templates) and kick off our year with what will become an annual planning retreat. Two days, kids taken care of, multiple sessions working through our family vision/mission/values, goals , issues to fix, etc. Another post or newsletter I’ll likely dive deeper, but we also redid our budget, and got aligned on our overall goals both financially and personally. Then we set up our weekly check-in meeting cadence, and got our Quarterly offsite scheduled. It’s been a revelation. Less stress, more intentionality with our time, less confusion about schedules or apologies for missing or forgetting things. The kids are in on it too. They know we have a budget for everything including “kids stuff”. They know we do our family meeting and usually have someone watch them for us. Probably the greatest thing about it is that my wife and I are truly partners and collaborators with clear responsibilities and ways to communicate how we can help each other. And it makes it much easier to loop friends and family in if they ask us if we need any help (cause you know, 3 small kids can be a lot of work 😂) Here’s a recent post from said coach (Hey Blake!) where he goes over the quarterly meeting agenda. Take a look! Happy to answer questions about it too. Let’s dig in to stuff from this week. Surprisingly I have a good amount to react to given I was largely offline all week (thanks to Daniel for holding the fort down!) Best, ~Sean What we’re seeingBuilding integrations with AI This week I saw that Pandium and Integration.App released features for AI to help build your integrations. Pandium has the AI internalized- you provide what you’re looking for in a structured form, their CLI (and their platform) runs some agentic code gen on it, and it spits out the code you need locally to get what you want. All code first, basically just wired up to their platform at the obvious points (auth, credentials, some runtime, etc) Integration.app took the approach of providing some context and prompts for whatever AI coding copilot you like to leverage to get building integrations fast, also leveraging code, also leveraging the various layers of their platform. These entrants are similar in spirit but different in audience and execution to Zapier’s helpful AI copilot, or Make’s recipe builder, or any of the dozen+ AI workflow builders’ native tooling (Relay.app, MindStudio, n8n, and more). It’s obvious why you’d want this. The holy grail for integration development for a few decades has been “integration development that don’t require (expensive( engineers to build”. There are trade offs for every approach. We’ve had our own set of trade offs for Frigg . Drag n drop workflow builders are an obvious attempt at this, with varying degrees of success. But as anyone who has tried building high complexity integrations with these tools can tell you: you may be able to avoid actual code, but you can’t avoid needing to think like an architect or engineer. The hope with AI, then, is that the copilot can act as your architect or engineer guide, bringing you to the right integration without needing to hand craft every piece. I personally don’t know if anyone has fully solved this yet. But, I’m happy to see the different opinions and solutions enter the market. Ask me anything about this topic, or feel free to reply and debate! I’ll write up our debate for another post if it’s helpful for folks to follow along 🙏 What we’re hearingLining up test accounts, QA, people to support, and more take up a lot of calendar time. Add something else to the bucket of things AI can’t really help with (yet). I suppose I “heard” this less than I witnessed it in my occasional check-ins this week, but 100% of our clients with active projects have had some delays caused by people, systems, or processes that (despite attempts at getting ahead of things) are out of really any one person’s control. Even internally inside orgs.
I mention these because I think they’re still things that can be addressed heading into any strategy around building integrations. It’s these things, not necessarily just the code, that can slow up release and drag them from a few weeks to a few months (or more!). It’s part of why I’m experimenting with models for getting those blockers out of the way and letting us just run at developing, launching, and iterating. Win wins for everyone, the biggest being your customer base. What we're doingWell, goodbye to my overlapping diagrams this week, hello to a summary. This week we’ve been working on releasing two massive Zapier app updates, one massive Make.com app update, getting a Frigg app deployed in the EU for an Asana and a Canva app, and running maintenance and updating tasks across all of our client codebases. The fun part for me is when we get to demo for folks and receive a few light bulb or aha moments, sometimes even getting a chuckle (or I’d even say a cackle?) at what we’ve cooked up. Even after all the acceleration from AI, or the “cheapening” of app development, or the state of play in SaaS… seeing tools work together in flows that clearly deliver meaningful impact to real people operating their personal and business lives is just a magical and fun moment. Anywho, we’re still looking for more companies to take us up on our 5 company unlimited integrations offer. We have a few interested, hoping to close out the cohort by the end of July. Reply to let me know your thoughts. What do you want to know more of? Smash that unsubscribe button below if you don't like it. Forward to a friend if you do! Until next time!Sean Matthews |
Left Hook
What’s Cookin’ in Hook-land? (Vol.4)
Sean Matthews
1y·8 min read
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