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Hey There! Below is our/my weekly newsletter on anything integration and APIs. As always, please reply and let's talk about whatever catches your attention, or any questions you might have. On a personal note…This weekend while going on a mini family hike, I had some flashbacks to my time working at a Scout camp for 10 summers. And yes, I somehow managed to tie it back to some insight around Left Hook and integration expertise. Stick with me, I promise. There may be a 15 year old parody music video for you. I've often said Scout camp is where I learned how to work I was 13 until my early twenties. By the end, I was in senior leadership as a Trek Director, guiding week-long backpack and canoe trips (whitewater, portaging, the works). So I wasn't necessarily IN camp all the time, but the job nonetheless was almost always "on" for 8 weeks at a time. As a teenager who was a night owl and loved to sleep in... this was initially daunting. Then I grew to love it. I think because of this, I find grinding through long hours and tedious work to be relatively easy to do. I remember the all-in feeling of waking up at 6AM (I'm not an early riser), getting to the dining hall for staff line-up, entertaining and educating, moving into the flow of the day, and at each step of the way having something always on the mind that "needs doing". Don't get me wrong, we had a lot of fun (see parody video for evidence) and I wasn't suffering for it. I learned a heck of a lot. My deep-seeded appreciation for the meditative qualities of fine woodworking comes from late nights in the Quartermaster building working on a drafting table one year, a swinging bench another, etc. as gifts for the long-term dedicated adult leaders of camp. But it was a grind. We were all in. We had little time to go explore the world outside of our camp, to learn best practices, to pause and ask if there were other ways of doing things. We were taking national training, combining with local operating procedures, and just doing our best. And here's where I had an epiphany while on my mini-hike this weekend: I asked myself, would I have liked it if someone came in for a weekend or even a week, watched, then offered different ways of doing things? Or even more apt, would I have listened willfully and attentively if the Director of Sports brought someone over to give me some advice? Because that's what we've been doing at Left Hook for 10 years now. We often get brought in because someone is trying to get something built or decided on, and their existing team is too heads down busy to help them out. In comes Sean, with his suggestions. He's not in it day to day. He doesn't know the nuances. And why is the Sports Director bringing him over? My personal answer to that question? (Would I have liked it if someone came in offering that?)... Yes. A big yes. Maybe it's part of who I am, but I really often did wonder "are we doing this right? How else do other people do it?" Given the chance to learn from someone who has spent an equal amount or MORE of time scanning the horizon as I have grinding away in our one camp, I would have loved to listen and absorb. Heck, if I had the cashflow, I might have even paid for it! (Let's be real, Scouting as a non-profit was not notoriously awash in cash) Anywho, hope you like my analogy. I did. Tickled me. Maybe because it gave me an opportunity to share that music video with an audience that sure as heck never would have cared or found it in the first place 😂 Best, ~Sean What we’re seeingSlow moving titans for Enterprise integration, and a reminder of the relatively small niche product integrations truly are For the past few newsletters, I've attempted to ask a slew of search and LLM-based tools for any industry news, just to scan the headlines and make sure I didn't miss anything. Maybe it's the fact that enterprises are more likely to run traditional press releases. Or maybe it's the fact that the news in the software product space around integrations is swallowed up by the amazing firehose of AI and MCP. But... every week, I've been hit with 95% "news" related to big legacy integration players, with only a few scant mentions of the startups and newer tools on the scene. Kong raising money; Salesforce announced ability for Agentforce Actions (akin to defining tools for an AI to call/use); Boomi launched a new platform version; Jitterbit made some waves; Apparently SnapLogic is still kickin! The regular review of these topics has reminded me that the majority of APIs and Integrations are truly not exposed to the outside world. They're built for private use. Often internally at enterprises and governments working to coordinate workforces in the thousands to millions of users, with hundreds to thousands of systems needing to communicate to each other. There's big money there; it's also why the integration tech started there. And they're not going away! But... for my audience... we can largely ignore the day to day. That said, talk to me if you need a MuleSoft or any of the legacy connectors. I'll see what we can do ;-) Scott Brinker is on his way out at HubSpot I can't tell if this one feels huge because of how HubSpot has been an occasional referral partner for us and long on our radar? Or maybe because chiefmartec landscape maps were one of the earlier inspirations and insights for us realizing that "Oh, with all of these tools just proliferating, someone is going to need to know how to connect them all"... But any way you slice it, a VP of Ecosystem leaving a public SaaS company constitutes big news in the Software integration space :-) It's been a run! I'm looking forward to reading some stats that either Scott or others (maybe Hugh?) will undoubtedly put together to highlight the growth of HubSpot's ecosystem under Scott's purview. I know it takes a village or small army to build a truly great product an experience, so the success of the HubSpot team can't be put squarely on Scott's shoulders... but it takes committed vision and leadership to do it well. Whenever people ask about certain types of developer experiences, I'll often point to HubSpot's docs, marketplace, and platform as a place to emulate. (Sure, I've got my quibbles, but they do a lot of things great) Scott graciously gave me some time to catch up this week, and while he couldn't say what's next, his passion for "ecosystem" (of ALL kinds) truly stands out. He basically just smiles when he says the word 😂. I asked if he had a bit of a crystal ball, with the rise of AI and MCP and proliferation of "anyone can build an App or Agent now", what does he think comes next? His answer was thoughtful and nuanced... if MCP takes hold and gets worked out, then the really gritty stuff that used to bog down potential product/systems integration really starts to go away and get smoothed over. Partnership and ecosystem conversations that used to stall out at "okay, who's going to build it, where will the code live, when will it get built" are now back to being possible where the terms of the agreement are the bottleneck. And the ecosystems that informally get created around individuals, small businesses, any of the traditionally "offline" industries, can start to find and take shape in a digital space. It was a short conversation, but got the ball rolling on some thoughts for myself. Anyway. Cheers to a legend. Excited to see what's next :-) Clay raised $100m You've probably heard. Clay raised a $100m Series C. I mention them not because I want to talk GTM and APIs. But because they started their life as an integration platform. We had conversations early with them to help build out a number of connectors. We even had looked at hiring an early dev for them, which was eye opening because most devs don't have the experience building integrations for many APIs. It's a rare bird. Anyway, I've been following their progress as they've made a few pivots, and it reinforces a few things that I've been mulling over; all software is integration (more on that below). And as Anthony Pierri (from FletchPMM) likes to say, all business software is workflow software. In other words... all software is integration and workflow automation. It all just depends on what shortcuts, bundles, UI, and organizing you want to do. What slice of the chaos do you want to tackle? Who do you want to help, and how do they physically do their job? And so on. Now, that can get pretty meaningless if you stare at those sentences. In Clay's case, they had an integration platform. They saw that a killer usecase for how they built their platform was waterfalling data to enrich user and company information. So they followed their customers' pull. They started baking their messaging around that use case. They refined the edges in their product to tilt in that direction and make it easier to use. They sourced great data, and great integration partners. They built and delivered. And they did a lot of other important ecosystem related things along the way. There's still a lot of time left to see if they'll go full escape velocity... early signs are good, and it's an interesting reminder of how integrations can really pull a company and product in new and interesting directions. What we’re hearingWhat is an integration? Apparently a question I submitted to Rob Walling's Startups For The Rest Of Us podcast a few months ago was answered last week. I found out because I got a LinkedIn DM and a chat from two different people asking sort of the same question: what is an integration? They are both entrepreneurs bootstrapping SaaS products, for context of their question. They were asking about how to think about "custom integrations" vs. "product integrations", and trying to understand where Zapier and other integration platforms fit in the mix, and whether n8n could be useful? and more. The question they were really asking prompted me to think about my overlapping spheres diagram and post this on LinkedIn I made an update:
I'm sure this can be broken down into further categories in each of the other major groups, but let's click on the Product one for a second. As I sort've ranted above, products ARE integrations. Depending on how you built your product, it may very well be on a platform that has made multiple different integrations for you under the hood. Almost no software tool today rolls their own email sending service, for instance. And even if they did, you can bet they used some open source package and "integrated" it into the rest of their code. (One of the more annoying and time consuming parts our marketing and communication efforts is trying to explain to developers that the "APIs" we care about are the HTTP ones, between services, and NOT the APIs that their favorite open source packages expose for use in their code.) Anyway, the point that these two folks were asking me a mix of "how do I think about integrating to build my product" and "how do I let customers integrate my product with their other products"? And I'd even add the third use case, which I'm tackling for a separate software partner/client, of "how do I get my back-office automations hooked into my product?" The answer to each of those is "it depends", and some technology choices can be used across multiple. I've seen n8n come up now 4 times in the past few weeks as a solution for people that started as "we use it to automate some of our internal systems" and has started to move into "we're looking at using it to offer native integrations". But not all integration tools are created equal- and your product might beg for a different approach! Anyway. I would love feedback on that diagram. Is it helpful? Does it clarify anything? Muddy anything up? "We've been meaning to build the integrations, but have kept needing to tackle other things and they just keep slipping..." I suppose I could have anticipated this would be a recurring theme. My conversation with Fraser from Cyclr included his juicy one-liner of "Integrations are one of the first things dropped when putting out fires. And there are always fires burning. Especially in startups." He was saying it in reference to the client base and what size companies are typically good fit for their tooling. But I think it's a heuristic that applies broadly. I get why! They're complicated, they solve pains for only a subset of users, and you only ever control 1/2 of the equation. Much easier to go solve the burning fires you have full control over. I heard that quote on a call this week and it made me think "ah, what a weird business pain to try to build around... the thing that doesn't warrant solving when other fires are burning, but that builds up and becomes painful when not addressed". Anyway, I'll be here trying to tell you take your vitamins. Whenever you need an integration surgeon- we'll be here for that too! I'd offer more insights on what we're hearing but it's getting late and I've already written your head off. Moving on! What we’re doingVacations, Conversations, and GTM Materials (Programmatic Video? with AI assist?!) Daniel was OOO last week (deservedly so!) which paused some momentum on the development front for different projects. The timing was good as we had a lot in QA/waiting for feedback, and I could handle the lighter load in between. I the meantime, I had my hands full of conversations and other non-development work. In particular, we're building out an offering for Go-to-Market materials for one client with an eye towards making it generally available for everyone. Turns out, there's an open source package for using React/code to create videos. Storyboards + assets + recordings + react components, and you can render and print videos. (Here's the tool) "Okay, what's cool about a developer tool for making videos? Developers aren't exactly the target market for video creation..." Accurate 😂 but, importantly, one of the biggest pitfalls of software delivery, especially integration delivery, is that the gap from "Code delivered and tested" to "here's GTM material" is loooong and difficult to bridge. I'm enamored with the idea that I can give any developer working on an integration project a templated set of storyboards, ask them to take screen grabs while they're working on the finishing touches, and then tell them to code up the video. What makes it even more interoperable now... that tool now has an MCP server pointed at its docs. You can pipe that into cursor or claude code or wherever. And now any developer and non-developer can look at the rendered video and ask "Can you make the font smaller from seconds 8 to 10? And can you add a different background color? Oh also, transition from scene 5 to scene 6 could be slower". The goal: every delivery from Left Hook from now on has a fairly well polished video highlighting the integration. It can be shared around internally. Or shared publicly. And we are now offering more extensive offerings... long form video, walkthroughs, voiceovers, blog posts, webinars for training. All because I have a pet peeve with delivering great functioning code only to see it quietly launched and barely mentioned. We're gonna change that. Oo, a call-out block again! We’re still looking for more companies to take us up on our 5 company unlimited integrations offer. We have two spots left, hoping to close out the cohort by the end of August. 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.6)
Sean Matthews
1y·16 min read
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