DEV Community: David Molot

Why you should offer native integrations and a Zapier app

David Molot — Thu, 19 May 2022 13:52:06 +0000

How is hotglue different from Zapier? Can you use hotglue and Zapier together? Why should you use hotglue and Zapier together?

These are questions our team gets asked quite often, either from engineers already working with hotglue or potential teams that are looking to add integrations to their product. The short answer is yes, you can use hotglue and Zapier together, but whether or not you should depends on what you are trying to achieve for your end users.

Zapier

Zapier is a tool that helps you automate workflows by connecting the SaaS products you use everyday.

For example, it can help you automate tasks like sending an email to a new customer that has signed up for your product.

In Zapier, you could achieve this by connecting your billing system (think Stripe) and your email marketing software (think Mailchimp). Then, every time you get a sign up, Zapier will receive a trigger from Stripe, and add the email to a Mailchimp campaign.

What should I use Zapier for?

As said before, Zapier helps you automate tasks for thousands different apps. We even use Zapier to automate some things at hotglue!

The best way to think about Zapier is like a “when this occurs, trigger this” logic machine that connects all of your SaaS apps.

Individual Use Case

Let’s start with a Zapier use case from an end user’s prospective. Imagine you had your own online shop where you sold the coolest t-shirts ever. You are having so much success that you are getting hundreds of orders for your shirts. But there are so many orders, you can’t keep up with all the t-shirts you need to pack! You realize you need a better system.

Here comes Zapier, the perfect system to automate a workflow to help you process more orders. To solve this issue, you want your online shop (let’s say you run it on Shopify) to send you an email with the order details every time a new order comes in.

In this situation, you would set up a Zap (what Zapier calls a pairing of integrations) that would send you an email every time a new order is created in Shopify. Now, instead of needing to track orders in Shopify, you can just use your email to see if you’ve packed the order for that t-shirt.

Product Use Case

Let’s now look at it from the perspective of a team building a product. Do you want your product to have a Zapier app? This would allow customers to bring in or pull out data to and from thousands of other business apps using no-code triggers.

Let’s imagine that you were building an email newsletter product called MailMonkey, and you wanted your users to get a notification every time a new contact signs up for one of the newsletters.

On the product team’s side, you would need to build a Zapier app for your users. They have a bunch of documentation on this, but the TL;DR is that you can use their no-code app builder or their CLI to build this Zapier app.

One you have the Zapier app built, your users can create a Zapier account, and build the Zaps to leverage it. Note that this requires some setup on their side, but you can also offer template Zaps to make things easier.

hotglue

hotglue is a tool that helps software products offer their users native integrations with the other business tools they use (such as Salesforce, HubSpot, Quickbooks, etc.).

For example, if you were building a product that needed to bring in data from your customer’s CRMs (like Salesforce and HubSpot), you would use hotglue to power that integration. This would allow your app to read (and write) data to and from Salesforce for your users!

What should I use hotglue for?

hotglue is built for engineering teams that want to offer native integrations in their product.

hotglue is designed to give engineers the same flexibility as they would have when building integrations in-house, but without dealing with API edge cases, maintenance, and orchestration when syncing data to and from other systems.

Product Use Case

Let’s walk through an example of where someone uses hotglue.

One of our awesome early customers, Mailmodo, offers an email outreach tool for sending interactive forms and collecting responses.

If you have ever dealt with email marketing before, you know that personalization of an email (with fields like first name, company name, etc.) are key to success. Often times, these fields are already available in some system, such as a CRM like Salesforce and HubSpot or a product analytics system like Mixpanel.

Without a native integration, Mailmodo’s users would be forced to manually copy and paste these fields from their CRM into Mailmodo, or have to create messy spreadsheet exports. Obviously, that wouldn’t be a good user experience.

This is why native integrations are so essential! With a native integration, Mailmodo users can just link their business apps to Mailmodo – from there, hotglue handles syncing all the relevant data under the hood. No spreadsheets, no copy and paste. It just works 🪄

When you are building a product for businesses, and need to send data or receive data to users business apps, hotglue fits perfectly and helps facilitate the whole experience.

Should I offer a Zapier app and use hotglue (offer native integrations)?

The answer, of course, depends on your situation.

So when should you use hotglue and Zapier together?

There are certainly situations where you should use hotglue and Zapier together. As the examples above illustrate, Zapier is the perfect system for trigger-based integrations that aren’t moving lots of data.

hotglue is fantastic for deeper integrations that you want to sit natively inside of your product. Often these integrations may require some transformations and handle large amounts of historical data.

Hybrid model

We believe that the best solution is a hybrid model. This combination of the two tools would have hotglue handle the deeper integrations your users care most about. This would allow for the hotglue-powered integrations to act as if you had built them natively, allowing for complex processes and transformations with tons of data.

Additionally, your product can offer a Zapier app to enable users to access the long tail of integrations that only some small subset of your users would want.

By using both hotglue and Zapier, your product will be able to integrate with the vast majority of business workflows. Further, by ensuring the most important integrations work natively, the experience for end-users will be seamless.

Your users matter

It also depends on your users! With Zapier, your users are required to pay for another tool, and need to do custom work to set up the Zap. Additionally, if an issue occurs with their Zap, you are removed from the actual data transfer, so you’d have to rely on users to debug what happened. Usually this results in a significant drop-off of users as the barrier to using your product becomes quite high.

With hotglue, the integration is embedded natively inside of your product, so all your users need to do is authenticate with the third-party system (for example, login to their Salesforce account). Additionally, when things go wrong, you have complete access and control over the integration so you can see debug what happens without requiring the user to take action on their side.

Wrapping it up

In conclusion, combining the advantages of tools like hotglue and Zapier together enables your product to offer users options that will help your product grow in the fastest way possible.

Whether a user wants to directly hook their other SaaS tools into yours via the hotglue native integrations, or wants to use Zapier to wire multiple applications together, your product will be able to handle it.

If you have any questions on how to get started building native integrations, or how to offer integrations, feel free to reach out to us at hello@hotglue.io or find a time to chat with us here!

How to use Supabase and hotglue to offer a native integration in your product

David Molot — Wed, 02 Mar 2022 15:48:51 +0000

One of the most common feature requests in the SaaS world is an integration with a platform that a customer already uses. For example. if you are working on an email marketing software, you most likely will be asked to integrate with Salesforce, HubSpot, Mailchimp, and so on.

Integrations are messy, and even more so, dealing with the data that comes out of those APIs can be even messier. Even with all the trouble that integrations can put you through, Supabase and hotglue can help you standup a native integration for your users in no time.

What is Supabase?

Supabase is an open source Firebase alternative. It provides all the backend services you need to build a product, whether that is a database, auth, file store, or APIs for your database.

Supabase also offers a hosted platform which makes it very simple to get started without needing to manage any infrastructure.

What is hotglue?

hotglue enables you to offer native, user-facing SaaS integrations to your customers in minutes without sacrificing control over the data.

The integrations feel native because hotglue is embeddable, cloud-based, and built on the Python ecosystem — enabling developers to support more data sources, manage data cleansing & transformation, and offer a self-serve experience to their users. With hotglue, any developer can build a data integration pipeline in minutes without months of development and maintenance.

How to start creating your native integration

The first thing you need to do is figure out what integration you want to build. In this example, I am going to create a native Salesforce integration that pulls data from Salesforce and pushes the Salesforce data to Supabase. To build this integration, I am going to need a:

A Supabase database to push to (Supabase has a free plan to start with)
A Salesforce account with an OAuth app created
A hotglue account (hotglue has a 14-day free trial)

Collecting credentials

First and foremost, if you want to follow along with this Salesforce specific example, you can learn how to create your own OAuth app instantly here.

Once you’ve done that, you should keep the Salesforce OAuth app credentials handy as you will need those.

Next, you’re going to want to head to one of your projects in Supabase.

On this page, you should go ahead and click on the Settings tab from the left hand side of your screen.

Then within the Settings page, you are going to want to head to the Database tab under Project Settings.

On the Database page, scroll down until you find the Connection info section. Note down the credentials, including the Host, Database name, Port, User, and Password.

The last thing you will need is your Database schema. To find this, go ahead and click the Table Editor tab from the left-sided navigation bar.

Whatever you see in that top-left bar is your Schema. Make sure to note that down!

Configuring your integration in hotglue

Now it is time to switch over to hotglue and create the integration.

In hotglue, go ahead and head to the Sales flow in the upper left hand side of the screen. If you just made a hotglue account, there may be an additional flow called Invoices, as well as an additional tap inside of the Sales flow for HubSpot. You can ignore those for now.

Once in the flow, go ahead and click on the Salesforce card. Now you can input the OAuth credentials you put aside earlier.

Click the Save and Continue button, which will trigger a Salesforce OAuth screen to pop-up (if nothing comes up, you may have pop-ups blocked).

Now that you have successfully linked Salesforce, go ahead and jump into the fieldmapping to configure what you want to pull into Supabase. You do this by click on the card again and heading to the Customize Field Map option.

For this example, I am going to pull in Account, Contact, and Lead information.

Once you have finished configuring the field mapping, go ahead and click Save.

Now you need to configure your target. In hotglue, you are going to make your target the PostgreSQL target.

Now you should use the credentials you got from Supabase earlier and plug them into hotglue. Once you’ve done that, click Save & Continue.

Now, you are going to run a test job so that you can see the data you have in the account you connected populate your Supabase database. Head to the Jobs page and click the New job button in the top right hand corner. Now you can name your job and choose the source you want to run the job for! If you have already run the job and are retrying the job, you should click the “Reset source state” option.

❗ If you ran a job in hotglue and saw that the export failed, check and see if you have a description in your Supabase table. Sometimes it can cause issues when syncing the data. If you do have a description, go ahead and remove it, then try again.

Once the job completes, you should be able to see the data in Supabase! Let’s go check my database to see the data.

As you can see, the data has been populated in Supabase!

The end user’s experience

So now that you have set up your integration, and you see it working, you can see what it could look like for users of your product.

I’ve gone ahead and created small demo web-app to show what it could look like inside of your product! On this page, there is an open widget button. When I click it, it will open the hotglue widget.

As you can see, the Sales flow we were working in earlier is here. I am going to click into it!

Now, I can see that I can link my Salesforce account (and if you added any other sources in this flow, you would see them here as well). I’ll go ahead and click Salesforce.

Now it is time to go ahead and log in to Salesforce! Once you put in your credentials, click Log In.

Now Salesforce has been linked!

(Optional) If you want your user to run the job manually, you can have them click the three dots in the top right hand corner of the Salesforce card and run a job. Otherwise, it will follow the sync schedule configured in the hotglue admin panel!

Wrapping up

As you can see, using Supabase and hotglue together makes it really easy to get your native integration set up in a matter of minutes.

If you would like to check out the fastest growing open-source database company out there, you can head to Supabase’s site here.

If you would like to check out the easiest way to offer your users native integrations inside of your product, you can check out hotglue’s site here.