How to decide which integrations to build when you don’t have customers yet

Most businesses are inundated with integration requests from clients and prospects. And while it can be stressful and difficult to prioritize these requests, these businesses have clear guidance on the integrations they need to build.

Startups that have yet to acquire clients (perhaps because they’re in stealth) aren’t afforded this luxury. 

But that doesn’t mean these startups should avoid integrations or that they should pick and choose ones to build at random.

There are specific tactics they can take to identify not only the integrations they should build but also the ones they should build first.

Let’s break each of them down.

Note: For the rest of the article, we’ll assume that you, the reader, work at a startup as described above. In other words, we’ll be switching over to the second-person point of view. 

Spy on your competitors and identify trends

While your startup is likely unique in several ways, there are probably specific competitors you can point to.

These competitors will, in many cases, publicly list out the integrations they’ve built through their integration marketplace, giving you an easy way to see what they’ve implemented so far.

For example, let’s imagine that you’re building an employee rewards and engagement platform and you consider Bonusly and Snappy to be your biggest rivals.

According to their integration marketplaces, they both offer integrations with HRIS solutions. In addition, many of the HRIS solutions they integrate with overlap. For instance, they both integrate with Namely, HiBob, ADP, BambooHR, among a few others. 

While a sample size of 2 competitors isn’t high, the fact that they both invested in HRIS integrations and have overlapping integrations likely means that you should and need to follow suit to be competitive. 

Related: How to decide when you should outsource integrations

Perform market research on your buyer personas

You can partner with a 3rd-party market research solution or agency to source a panel filled with your buyers personas. You can then ask this survey panel whether they’d want integrations with your product and, if so, which applications they’d want to connect to. 

While this tactic is fairly straightforward (the bigger challenge might be deciding on the solution or agency you use), there are a few nuanced points to keep in mind when designing your survey questions:

• List out ALL potential integrations to capture every opportunity. It may seem overwhelming for your respondents to see 15, 20, 25 applications listed, but you ultimately don’t know which applications they’ll select—so it’s better to be safe than sorry. Also, this prevents them from forgetting an application or having the application’s name slip their mind as they’re taking the survey. 

• Ask respondents to rank the integrations they selected. By seeing which integrations are most important to your ICP, you’re much better equipped to prioritize them. 

• Have respondents assign dollar values to the integrations they selected. In other words, ask them how much they’d pay for integration x, integration y, integration z, etc. The answers should, more or less, correspond to the rankings they provided in the previous question, but this can help validate the demand and business potential for a given integration.

• Provide potential use cases from the integration categories and ask respondents to stack rank them. Your respondents may, initially, prefer one category of integrations over others, but they may not have thought through the integration categories’ use cases for your product. Laying out the use cases gives them this opportunity and allows you, in return, to get a more accurate understanding of the demand for certain categories of integrations. 

Prioritize opportunities based on API availability and documentation quality

In some cases, a software provider doesn’t provide the API endpoint(s) you need. In more cases, the documentation they provide is so poorly structured, written, and/or limited in scope that you simply wouldn’t know (or would struggle to learn) how to build to the API endpoint(s), even if it was available. 

With this in mind, it’s worth assessing the applications in your list based on whether they provide the relevant API endpoint(s) and the strength of their API documentation. If an application fails to pass the former criteria, you should remove it from your list; while if an application has relatively poor documentation, it should be deprioritized (with exceptions).

Related: API integration security best practices

Offer every integration your prospects want as soon as your product launches

Once you’ve gathered feedback from your buyer personas and you’ve performed competitive research, you’ll likely realize that you need to build dozens, if not hundreds, of integrations with your product as soon as possible.

Instead of taking your in-house engineers away from working on your core product to focus on building integrations, you can simply use Merge—a single platform that lets you offer hundreds of integrations with your product.

Through Merge, you’ll also be able to provide integrations across key software categories, from HRIS to CRM to ATS. And you’ll receive robust management tooling for your customer-facing team and 24/7 maintenance support, all but ensuring that you’re able to offer reliable and performant integrations.

To learn more about Merge, and our discounted pricing for startups, you can schedule a demo with one of our integration experts.