Third Party Integrations as Growth Model for Start-ups

Sometimes you need to hear things multiple times before it sinks in. I remember seeing a great interview on Mixergy where they talked about using third party integrations as growth strategy for a start-up. Now I am selecting several tools to use for our own company I prefer the ones that connect to our first purchase Zendesk a year ago.

Zendesk Integration is a page with over three dozen of integrations and since Zendesk was our first buy, we integrated it with our website using the Zendesk and WordPress plugin.

Now we need a CRM solution and we are testing Batchbook and Bantam Live and both have a decent number of integrations. Batchbook for example with Zendesk. Thanks to AppSumo’s SXSW-bundle I decided to give LessAccounting a try and also they have a long list of integrations.

Also, we use Google Apps and are thinking of joining one of the one-click-buy App Marketplaces (read the post on Google App Marketplace for Startups) so integration is something we are really looking for. It’s not just a geek speaking, it’s just super handy having all support tickets for your clients visible in your Social CRM.

We use for example Hootsuite to monitor support questions online and if we wanted we could use the favorite option in Hootsuite and make any Twitter a ticket in Zendesk (thanks to its integration).

So it hit me this week, this integration is really a good way to market our application. Duuhhhh you say, you did hear the Mixergy interview months ago saying that. I know! But sometimes it takes a while to sink in. As a start-up, we have a million things to think about and currently, my mind seems to be ready for this new information.

So we are hunting for API’s now and so that after our beta we can add some nice integration and land on those third-party integration pages as well. Marketing using integration might be indeed an interesting growth method.

Anyone using this as a business strategy and admitting it? Love to hear some stories on the topic! Post them in the comments