About 10 months ago, we were approached by a large tech company to help them with their integration needs. They specifically needed help with integrations that we had previous experience with — automotive tech integrations. Many of us on the AwesomeAPI team and the broader Lincoln Labs team came from the automotive tech industry. Several of us worked on product and engineering teams in that industry. When we were approached about building integrations, we wondered if there was a larger opportunity. An opportunity to build a SaaS platform that integrates with hundreds of other systems providing a tool for tech companies to gain access to several integrations at once through a single unified API.
Iterate, Iterate, Iterate
Before getting to this point, we’ve gone through a couple of iterations of what our strategy could be. At first, we thought maybe we could provide development services specializing in integrations to automotive tech companies. That would have certainly leveraged our experience and knowledge, but wouldn’t have scaled very far beyond our own capacity.
Then we thought maybe we could provide sets of integrations to automotive tech companies. That seemed more doable, but our upside was limited to automotive tech. In addition to the limited upside, data is notoriously difficult to access in the automotive industry.
Where We Are Now
So that brings us to today. Our current goal is to ease the burden placed on product and engineering teams by providing several unified APIs that give teams access to bundles of integrations with one integration with our unified API. Our goal is to offer these across many industry verticals and software categories. We’re starting with a couple in automotive tech (because we’re familiar with them and we can prove the model) and then we’ll move on to other verticals (legal, hospitality, property management, etc.). Software companies have struggled for years to manage and build new integrations, especially vertical specific ones. We’ve been there as engineers and product managers and it’s not fun. It’s particularly painful when you have to build integrations instead of focusing on your core product. We all know that integrations are a must have, but they can really slow down progress on your main offering. We’ve decided to make integrations our main offering so you can focus on the rest. Our goal is to make the integration process fast and easy.
Building in Public
As we build our platform, we’re going to be open and transparent about our business model, challenges, successes, and approach. We’re going to build this in public. Next time on, “Building AwesomeAPI in Public”, we’re going to talk about some of our key metrics and goals for the next few months. So, grab some popcorn and come along for the ride!