Growing with Integrations

Speaker A: Does working with a potential product partner make this formula make sense? One plus one equals three. Does the value created by two entities coming together so great that it's better than you guys working separately together?

Speaker B: Welcome to SaaS Connect, the SaaS Partnership podcast brought to you by the Cloud Software Association. Thank you as always to our podcast producers, content allies. They help B2B companies like you launch revenue generating podcasts. They'll schedule interviews, produce a podcast and promote it. Check them out@contentallies.com hi everyone.

Speaker A: So we've had a lot of wonderful sessions these last two days about various aspects of partnerships of, uh, ISV programs, building ecosystems. Today I want to focus on a very particular area that has been very successful for us and something that we've grown over the last couple years and that is building a product partnership program through integrations. Before I get started, I want to share a little bit about Fireflies and myself. So I'm um, Chris Romanini, co founder and CEO at Fireflies. What Fireflies is is a AI meeting assistant that joins your Zoom, Webex, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, any video conferencing platform out there. It's a, uh, bot that joins your meetings. It transcribes, summarizes, generates notes and puts it into the systems where you already work. And on top of that, we're building a knowledge base that is built around conversations because we fundamentally believe all of the most important information your org happens through conversations and you should be able to search back through that. If I'm a salesperson and I just had a Zoom meeting or a discovery call, I can then add that meeting afterwards in notes, action items, and all the details logged already in Salesforce. It's funny because when I first started Fireflies, I didn't even know what a CRM was and let alone what Salesforce was. And fast forward a few years. This has become a really core part of our product strategy and we integrate with 8 AH plus different CRMs and dozens of other ERP systems today. Fireflies Today has users across a hundred thousand orgs. We've had our AI join meetings and take notes for over 10 million people and it is being used across a hundred different countries. And we've also recently expanded to foreign languages outside of English. It's always good to start with the why. So why integrations? Why did it work for us? I'm going to be talking about examples that apply to our company as well as other companies that we've learned from. And there are really two core areas for us when it comes to building Integrations. One is how are we driving value to our existing customers? How do we get them to experience the product better, use it more and more, expand and grow their user base on our platform. And then the other is using integrations as a way to drive acquisition. So this could be leveraging partners, resellers and other folks and totally increasing your addressable market through integrations. And for us, uh, partnerships is a means to an end rather than the other way around. Let's go into value for customers. And, and how do you define value? In the case of Fireflies, we're a very horizontal product. It's used in all types of meetings by all types of different verticals. So in order for us to be able to support these different ICPs and to be able to support these verticals, we need to provide integrations as a way to do that. And for that to happen, we have to also look at what are the type of meetings people tend to have. On average, a person could be having sales meetings. There could be someone else in your org having recruiting meetings, screening interviews, internal team meetings, product meetings. All of these different types of meetings and use cases are going to have to be put into different systems. So your sales notes might need to go into your CRM, but your screening interview with a candidate might need to go into your application tracking system. If you had an internal team sync and you want the notes shared in Slack, you don't have to do it manually anymore because Fireflies is going to take notes for you. So we start with a simple concept, but then it branches into all of these different areas that we have to plug into to create value. And it started with actually talking to our customers and understanding where do we even need to integrate with. For us, integrations is two parts. One is being able to capture all of your audio, video, conversations. Then we're doing all the processing, the AI, the analytics, the insights, the summaries, and then afterwards we're putting them into those systems. So today if I use a project management system like Asana, I could be saying certain tasks or action items in a meeting, and then afterwards those get created as tasks. In the Kanban board inside Asana, that's a very unique business process or workflow that we had to build towards. And that's where integrations add so much value to our end users, because now they don't have to go and do manual data entry. So if there was one thing we wanted to really solve was how do we help people get work done inside an organization with just the sound of their voice? Our audio and video sources typically include video conferencing platforms like Zoom, Google Meet. We also support telephony systems like RingCentral, Aircall, and also even screen recording tools like Loom. We ingest every form of audio and video that you can think of and then process it inside the Firefly system for our app integrations. These are some of the core ones, really popular project management systems, CRMs, communication platforms like Slack. We also have workflows like Zapier and then even storage systems. So if I had a meeting and I wanted a transcript saved as a PDF inside Dropbox, you can build that workflow on top of Fireflies. So at the end of the day, the value that you can provide to your customers was through building deeply with the existing workflows that they're already using. And you can bet that today on, um, if you take any Org, they're using hundreds of different SaaS applications. And for Fireflies, for us to be successful at doing what we needed to do, we had to build on top of connecting these, we had to be the glue, the intelligent router that connected all of these different applications, your systems of communication and your systems of record. And to be able to think through this and build this, we also had another goal in mind. It's much easier to replace a SaaS application. It's much harder to replace the piping or plumbing that you're able to build. And if you have a system like Fireflies that's integrated now into five to 10 different SaaS tools, it's a lot harder to rip and replace. And for us, that was like the strategic move to invest in integrations. And our data also shows this today. Our 60% of our most powerful, most active cohorts of users that pay us a lot also end up using some of these app integrations. And for us, integrations in a nutshell, is a key to driving engagement, retention and expanding and monetization, because there's certain integrations that they would pay for, certain integrations where they would want to be able to get other teams inside their organization using. So in the purpose of talking about partnerships and growth, here's how we're going to be able to go step by step into a very practical guide of how we use integrations to drive growth. I'm a firm believer that integrations creates a strategic product, offer partnership opportunity to go to market with what you're building and who you're building for. These are some of the ways that we leverage this today. And it can be very simple for especially for small companies that are trying to build their own brand, you can piggyback off some of the bigger brands out there. So app directories is essentially free traffic. So when we integrate with Salesforce or Slack and we're on the app directories and we're able to get a lot of traffic every month, this is very practical, easy way to start driving user acquisition for us. The other thing is PR and SEO. So whenever you're working with a product partner and you're able to get them to create content for you or promote you, usually this goes a long way, you get a lot of backlinks. So this is really practical and nitty gritty. But this stuff works especially at scale when you're integrating with dozens of other platforms. Over time for us, we've been able to leverage guest posts, blogs, co webinars, which have been extremely helpful so that I can reach new users from our partners, our uh, technology partners, customer base through those webinars to be able to educate and teach people about the product. And if all of those co marketing initiatives go well with partners, you can take it to the next level with co selling. And we've had this experience, a wonderful experience with RingCentral where their own sales team will plug Fireflies or sell Fireflies on our behalf anytime they see a customer that needs conversational intelligence tools on top of RingCentral and that is again, free traffic, you're getting revenue and you can start building out these lines with each integration. What is the revenue opportunity that you can get through those? We also have another situation with Aircall where they have customers that are looking at other alternatives. And if there's a competitive product that has this all bundled together, they're able to bring Fireflies into the deal to go close and win that product. So you have an opportunity to work together to stave off competition as well. And that's extremely valuable for us because once you've built that channel, it keeps giving back. And it's something that as you nurture and you grow and as it develops over time, it's another source of lead, gen and customers. There's one company that I particularly liked and I was influenced by in the early days and it was talkdesk. This is a cloud voiceover IP company. They're doing extremely well, growing like wildfire. But what was really incredible about TalkDesk was majority of their growth in the beginning, almost 90% of their growth came from two integrations. One was to Zendesk, uh, support and the other was to Salesforce support. So now this unicorn company was really built on top of those two core integrations. What's even more interesting when I dug deeper into talkdesk was Zendesk released their own voice product, which was competing directly with talkdesk. However, Zendesk knew the limitations of that product and it couldn't scale after a certain number of users. So anytime they had a customer where it wasn't the best fit, they would directly refer them to TalkDesk. And that partnership was still very symbiotic and they grew through that. So this goes to show that even if you are working with partners that have a slightly competitive roadmap or slight redundancy, remember that if your core areas, what you do well, are a differentiator, you can still have a successful partnership with those folks. And in the case of talkdesk, all they did was cloud voiceover ip. Zendesk has to build a CRM, a support platform and work on several other things. So they're not going to be able to go as deep as talkdesk would be able to. This is an example of one of our ecosystem plays with Asana. And the idea actually came from us seeing on Asana's annual meeting where they were presenting and they were Talking about their 10 year vision about how you can have meetings and then have your Asana boards filled. And we said, why can't we just do this in the form of an integration? And so Instead of waiting 10 years, we were able to do this in a matter, uh, of 10 days and build this integration out. And the advantage for being able to do this was when you're one of the only platforms that can build some sort of unique differentiator of value, you're going to start getting attention and people are going to start pulling through. For example, in CRMs, there's a lot of other competitors in our space that will be building for CRMs, but because we're a horizontal product and we might be supporting some vendors that other people aren't looking into, this actually gets us a lot more attention and traffic. And I'm going to go more into how to pick the right type of product partners to integrate with. But this is actually a really key thing for us is are you one of the only ones that's doing something special on that platform and that can help you differentiate for and fight for that term and want to rank for that term. And when we integrated with HubSpot and they have an incredible blog and content ecosystem, um, they were able to plug Fireflies in many articles that they were Writing and when they were talking about conversation intelligence, when they were talking about what are some of the tools that are out there, they would be recommending Fireflies. This got us a lot of backlinks, a lot of search terms. And while we built the integration, we're creating value, we're having our partners put us in front of other people. The other part of integrations that we discovered, again by accident, was that you get to create an ecosystem for resellers. Usually companies like HubSpot, Pipedrive, Salesforce have fantastic ecosystems of already existing resellers, solution partners, even influencers. We have, uh, an integration to Notion and Notion has this army of ambassadors that promote Notion. And so when you're able to integrate with these solutions, we'll have resellers approach us and say, hey, I'm already reselling HubSpot or M, I'm already reselling Salesforce, but I have customers where they would need something like Fireflies. I'm going to sell it as an add on for them. It's double the perks because they're getting Rev share from both Salesforce as well as Fireflies. But for us, it's another way to get plugged into an ecosystem that is already very energetic and has a lot of following. So we've been able to in recent times be able to work with folks that are promoting these sort of solutions and then get more know how through that. This is a classic example with a solutions partner from Pipedrive that we didn't even know. Um, Pipedrive has a robust SMB solutions partner ecosystem and they discovered Fireflies. They came on as a reseller and then they started generating content for us, videos, inviting us to podcasts, creating examples of how Fireflies and pipedrive can work well together and how the user base can leverage Fireflies. So this was another example of how we're almost outsourcing our marketing in a way through the partner program. The last piece of this user growth strategy that has worked for us is you can get noticed. And I used to not think that was a big deal in the early days. You just do your thing, you go build your integration and you go do what you have to do. But if you're able to go deep on an integration and do really well on those integrations, usually these folks start to notice because for them a lot of customers are coming through your platform to their platform as well. And there might be a huge amount of roadmap that they're not able to build right now that they can leverage their partners for. When we were able to do that and go deep with four or five different partners, we started getting early access to their features. We started getting attention from the SUI suite, we started getting most of our feature requests delivered because sometimes the native integrations are limited in terms of what you can do. But when you're able to say, hey, this is something that your customers really need, they're able to actually listen and take you seriously. Sometimes you have to pay to work with different types of product partners and you can get better API rates and better discounts to be able to work through that as well. This was something that I took for granted but then realized is actually a really powerful moat for going above and beyond. And we had our last speaker talk about some of the work that they're doing with Generative AI. And uh, that is the talk of the town now at GPT3, GPT4, ChatGPT. But like them, we were able to build that initial relationship with OpenAI and before the rest of the market had access to a lot of the ChatGPT features, we had about a year in advance to work on this technology and incorporate it into fireflies. So on top of just doing the meeting notes and summaries, we were able to release a new product well ahead of what was out there on the market called Ask Fred. And the idea here is I've gone through dozens of meetings throughout the day. I don't want to actually go back and listen to that meeting or read the notes. I can just ask Fred questions about that meeting. What was the decision that were made? Who were the people that were involved in that decision? What objections are there? What's the next steps in order for us to close this deal and then we're able to go and succinctly have Fred generate out all of these responses and answers. So for us this was also in a way to build that partnership and then do product differentiation by launching much earlier than other folks. That's why partners and getting noticed is a great way to also further your roadmap. I mean this is I think, something that a, uh, lot of companies have talked about in the past. But if there are ways to seriously be thinking about long term exit strategies for folks acquisitions, a lot of them, almost 50 to 60% of acquisitions happen through some form of integration channel. I think about it as an acquisition as a marriage and building an integration as the dating phase so that you are able to figure out if you're a good fit. You're working with their teams and you're seeing if this is synergistic and if there's like actual potential here to work together. And many companies, like large vendors that we worked with that approached us, or even smaller vendors that we OEM with that we wanted to potentially acquire, it happened through this form of integrations as a starting point. The truth is, integrations take work. There's so much advantage to building integrations. You can build a strategic moat. This was also mentioned in the last previous conversations. But the thing is, it's not a one and done sort of thing. You have to constantly be building, launching, maintaining and biz deving. It's a relationship that has to be nurtured continuously over time because you might launch and then realize that their product has changed or their APIs have changed and then you have to fix edge cases and bugs. And this is something we learn ourselves through working with multiple different integrations. And in the case of Fireflies, people could be using a layer of integrations. For example, they could be using Air Call to have their conversations. It runs through Fireflies and then they need to be now logged into HubSpot or Pipedrive. And some of these CRMs may not have ways to sync up the data based on the phone numbers versus emails. So these are like all different things you start realizing with various integrations as the layers of complexity increases over time when thinking about which integrations to build. Because not everyone can be like Zapier where they can build hundreds of integrations and then have thousands of other people build integrations on top of them. In order to be able to do that, you have to be very conscientious about which integrations you want to choose. So there were some mistakes we made in the early days. One was specifically around matching ICPs. So if you are selling primarily to SMBs or mid markets, don't go up front and integrate with an enterprise product partner. That's not going to work out. You may think that if I integrate with that, I'm naturally going to get enterprise customers. Think about your selling motion and how you actually get customers today. And we've had a lot more success when we've integrated with other SMB providers that match our icp. The other is the customer overlap. This is usually extremely valuable when you're able to use tools like Crossbeam where you sync up your CRMs with your partner and see which type of customers that you can resell to. And you can have a huge customer base to work with. We also like to get a feature request list going. And so before we even start working on an integration or going live with it we have about a wait list of about 20, 30 customers that are ready to use it once it's live. Next part is level of attention. This actually matters because when you are first building with a large product partner, you're not going to necessarily get the attention that you would want from them. And that is actually something you have to prove out over time. In the case of Zapier, they have different tiers where as you get more customers, as you make your product more reliable, they'll do more social selling for you, more marketing for you. But you have to also think about what is the level of attention I'm going to get. Some of the smaller folks are going to be giving you lots of attention, but they might not have the user base where it makes sense to invest in building out that integration, because it takes a lot of work. Not just from a, uh, marketing and sales and partnerships point of view, but even from an R and D point of view. Because I almost think of every integration as a new product that I'm standing up that I have to build and maintain. The last part is the quality of APIs. You can have eight of the same tools and each one does exactly the same thing at the surface level. But at their API level, it could be fundamentally different. When we integrated with eight different CRMs, each one works differently, each one has different rate limits, each one has different logic flows. So it is really like building eight different apps. You can abstract away most of it and build similar things almost like copy paste. But that's not always the case for most of these integrations. Another surprising discovery we found was that some of the best products that have the most fantastic UI may not necessarily have the best APIs. And some of the products with not so nice of, uh, a UI have wonderful APIs. So you're always going to be up for a surprise in terms of what you have to work with. And then again, going back to maintaining and building those integrations, it takes effort. So that's why pick the ones that you think are going to be the best for your customers, where there's overlap and you know that you're going to be able to gain traction over time. So, long story short, does working with a potential product partner make this formula make sense? One plus one equals three. Does the value created by two entities coming together so great that it's better than you guys working separately together? And not all of our integrations have been to that level of success and we've had to learn where. We've invested weeks, months in building these and we realized, oh, the uptick is not that great. So do we continue maintaining it? Do we shut it down? Do we prioritize our resources somewhere else? Because there is a real cost to it. But if it does take off and the synergy does work, it, uh, can really amplify and grow your business over time as you start building this out. Uh, I came from a perspective of a startup that's going out there building your integrations and getting other product partners on board. But once you start establishing yourself, you have your own user base. Your. You can then start building your own ecosystem and getting others to build on top of your platform. This takes a lot more time and work. But all the lessons you learn from building these integrations manually in the early days can be leveraged here, even for companies like Slack. When they first launched, one of our investors is the, uh, head of product at Slack. And one of the things that we noticed is they built their first a hundred integrations by themselves before they even offered other people to build Slack bots on top of them. And if you look at Salesforce, the Salesforce ecosystem itself is an entire market that you can leverage. In fact, there are companies today that are built exclusively on top of Salesforce's ecosystem. There are SaaS, products that are purely just Slack bots built on top of those ecosystems. So there's huge market opportunity. We're now starting to see companies that are just built on top of Zoom. This is something that you have to work your way towards, and it does take work. But all the lessons you learn from building individual integrations and partnering can then be done at scale through this. If there's anything to take away from this session. I think the first core part is integrations are fundamentally valuable at creating value for your customers and driving user growth. The next thing is picking which integrations you want to actually work with and how to leverage that integration. Whether it's co marketing, co selling, partnering at different levels with resellers, all of those things are very valuable if you can get that done right. This is something that we deeply believe in and think that integrations are a great market opportunity for any organization. Thank you.

Speaker C: I have one question for you. It sounds like you guys let in with mostly doing the integrations yourselves on your side. So are you at that point where you guys are starting to scale and opening it up to, uh, more of a developer program?

Speaker A: Yeah, so we're just at that transition phase with our API and we're learning. A lot of the lessons overlap as well with these. The main challenge here is you have to now not just work with partners and other product companies, you have to work with developers and they usually work differently. They're going to have a whole set of questions and try to stress test your APIs and try to break them and you have to work on that. And then the other part is quality control. How do you maintain the right type of integrations on your marketplace?

Speaker C: Are you guys thinking of doing some sort of developer portal or any other kind of self service help for the developer?

Speaker A: Yeah. So I think we look at like companies like Zapier who've done a fantastic job, but we need to stand up our own team that's going to go through that review process and help people submit, publish. And ultimately why would someone want to build on top of the Fireflies ecosystem is how are they going to make money through that or how are they going to acquire customers through that?

Speaker C: Yeah. Awesome. Thank you so much.

Speaker B: If you like this and want more great insights on software partnerships, you've got to rate like and subscribe and subscribe and join us at thecloudsoftwareassociation. Com. Thank you as always to our podcast producers, Content allies. They help B2B companies like you launch revenue generating podcasts. They'll schedule interviews, produce the podcast and promote it. Check them out at Content allies. Com. We'll see you on the next episode.