Three months ago, you had zero integration requests. Now you have a spreadsheet with 47 rows.
The weird part? Most of them contradict each other. Enterprise prospects want Salesforce. Your happiest customers want Slack. Someone on a trial mentioned Zapier. Your competitor’s website lists 15 integrations and you’re convinced that’s why they’re winning deals.
You open the spreadsheet again. Salesforce appears 8 times. Or is it 12? You tagged some as “sales blocker” and others as “nice to have” but you’re not sure which system you were using that week. There’s also HubSpot, Pipedrive, Monday, Jira, Stripe, QuickBooks, and something called “Workato” that you’ve never heard of.
A developer quoted you $15K to build Salesforce. Another one said $8K but couldn’t start for two months. An agency sent a proposal with a Gantt chart that made your head hurt. Someone mentioned “unified APIs” and “iPaaS” and you nodded along while googling the terms under the table.
Meanwhile, actual decisions keep getting postponed. Your team asks which integration to prioritize and you say “let me think about it.” A prospect follows up about Salesforce and you say “we’re evaluating options.” Three months becomes six months. The spreadsheet hits 60 rows.
This guide isn’t about how to build integrations. It’s about how to stop drowning in integration requests and ship 3 that actually matter—in 90 days, without a technical co-founder, without analysis paralysis.
Start with strategy: Why do you need integrations right now?
Most founders approach integrations backwards. They ask “What integrations should we build?” when the real question is “What business problem are we solving?”
Here’s what actually happens: A prospect mentions Salesforce on a call. A customer emails asking about Slack. Your competitor lists 15 integrations on their website. You panic and think “We need integrations!” Then you start building without a clear goal, ship something nobody uses, and waste three months.
Stop. Pick one outcome first.
Start with one goal: Acquire, Retain, or Expand
The spreadsheet is already a problem. Adding more rows won’t help. You need a filter—one clear goal that eliminates 80% of those requests immediately.
If you’re a non-technical SaaS founder, the fastest way to cut through noise is to decide why you need integrations right now. Pick one primary outcome for the next 90 days and make every decision serve that outcome:
- Acquisition: Deals are stalling or dying because you don’t integrate with something prospects already use.
- Retention: Customers are leaving because your product creates extra work—exports, imports, double-entry—instead of fitting into their existing workflow.
- Expansion: Your best customers stop growing with you because your product sits in a silo, disconnected from where they actually work.
Pick one. Not two. Not “all three are important.” One.
Why? Because each goal points you toward completely different integrations. Acquisition means you’re building for prospects you don’t have yet. Retention means you’re solving problems for customers you already have. Expansion means you’re deepening value with your best accounts. Different problems, different integrations, different timelines.
Write down your rules before you look at any integration requests. These rules will save you from building the wrong thing:
- Must-have criteria:
Set a specific threshold that forces you to ignore noise.
If you’re focused on Acquisition: “Only integrations mentioned by 3+ prospects worth $50K+ in the last 60 days.”
If you’re focused on Retention: “Only integrations requested by customers representing $100K+ ARR, or mentioned in 3+ churn conversations.”
If you’re focused on Expansion: “Only integrations used daily by our top 10 customers by revenue.”
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Time horizon: “90 days from pick to GA, with measurable adoption.” If you can’t ship it in 90 days, it’s too complex for your first integration.
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Single definition of success: Pick ONE metric you’ll actually track:
Acquisition: “Close X deals that were blocked on this integration” (pick a real number based on your pipeline)
- Retention: “Reduce churn among connected customers by [measurable amount]”
- Expansion: “Connected customers use the product X days per week vs Y for non-connected”
How to find your integration candidates (without the spreadsheet spiral)
You’ve picked your goal. Now you need to find which integrations actually serve it. This is where most founders either (1) go with gut feel and pick wrong, or (2) try to “analyze all the data” and never decide.
Here’s a faster way: spend 2 hours total, not 2 weeks.
Pull 5-8 candidates from real signals (30 minutes)
Open four sources and tally as you go. If you’re focused on Acquisition, start with your sales notes—search your CRM, email, or Gong for phrases like “integrate,” “work with,” “connect to.” Look at lost deals from the last 90 days and note which tools they mentioned. Keep a tally.
If Retention is your goal, go to your support tickets instead. Search for “export,” “import,” “CSV,” “how do I get this into.” What tools are customers trying to connect manually? Which questions repeat?
Everyone should check their competitor’s integration pages. Visit your top 3 competitors and note what they list first or feature prominently. But don’t just copy—cross-reference with your goal. Do your prospects or customers actually use these tools?
Finally, any integration mentioned by a customer worth $50K+ ARR or a prospect with a $50K+ deal size goes on your list automatically. High-value accounts get special treatment.
Stop at 5-8 candidates. You don’t need more data.
Sarah (the PM tool founder from earlier) found: Slack with 7 sales mentions and 12 support tickets, Jira mentioned in 5 lost deals, Asana requested by 2 small customers, Trello mentioned once, and Monday cited 3 times but only by prospects who never bought. She stopped there.
Spend 10 minutes checking if each one is actually buildable (60 minutes total)
You’re not a developer, but you can spot obvious problems. For each candidate, open their developer documentation and look around for 10 minutes.
First question: can you even access their API? Look for a “Getting Started” or “Quick Start” guide. Try to create a developer account. If you hit a “contact sales” wall or there are no public docs, that’s a red flag. Move on.
Second question: can you do the specific thing you need? If you want to create Salesforce leads, search their docs for “create lead API.” If you want to post Slack messages, search for “post message.” The action you need should be documented with examples. If it’s not there, or requires an “enterprise tier” that costs $50K/year just to access, mark it as complex.
Third question: how good are the docs? This is subjective but trust your gut. Clear code examples? A sandbox or test mode you can try? Error messages explained? That’s a green light. Sparse documentation from 2019 with broken links? Yellow or red flag.
You’re looking for integrations where the path is obvious. When you finish this exercise, you should be able to say “this one looks straightforward” or “this one looks messy” for each candidate.
Sarah spent 10 minutes on Slack’s docs and found clear examples for posting messages. She spent 10 minutes on Jira’s docs and got confused by terminology and multiple API versions. Slack = green light. Jira = yellow flag.
Use a simple 2×2 to make your final decision
Forget scoring systems. Put your candidates on a 2×2 matrix with two axes:
Business Impact (vertical axis): How much revenue does this protect or unlock? High impact means it’s mentioned in 30%+ of deals, or affects $100K+ ARR at risk. Low impact means it’s nice-to-have or affects less than $50K ARR.
Technical Complexity (horizontal axis): How hard is this to build based on your 10-minute docs review? Simple means you got a green light—clear examples, you could brief a freelancer on this. Complex means yellow or red flags, unclear documentation, or requires deep domain knowledge.
Draw four quadrants:
Top-left (High Impact, Simple): Build these first. Quick wins that unlock revenue.
Top-right (High Impact, Complex): This is your “should we hire an agency?” quadrant. Too important to skip, too complex to build quickly in-house.
Bottom-left (Low Impact, Simple): Build these last, or let customers connect them via Zapier.
Bottom-right (Low Impact, Complex): Don’t build these. Tell requesters “not on the roadmap right now.”
Sarah’s matrix looked like this: Slack (High Impact, Simple) in the top-left. Jira (High Impact, Complex) in the top-right. Asana and Monday in the bottom row. She picked Slack for immediate build and Jira for agency work.
Your first 3 integrations should come from the top row. If you have more than 3 high-impact candidates, start with the simplest ones. Build momentum before tackling complexity.
The build vs buy decision (make this before you waste time)
Here’s the truth: Most non-technical founders agonize over “should we build this ourselves?” after they’ve already invested weeks researching the integration. Make this decision first, before you brief a developer or agency.
You have three realistic options, and the choice depends more on your situation than the specific integration.
Option 1: Build it in-house
This means hiring someone (employee, contractor, or freelancer) who writes custom code connecting your app to theirs. Choose this when the integration is core to your product’s value—like if you’re building Salesforce reporting tools, the Salesforce integration IS your product. Also choose this if you need deep customization that off-the-shelf tools can’t handle, or you have an existing technical team with bandwidth.
Expect to pay $5K-$15K per integration for a basic version, with 3-8 weeks timeline for your first one. The big risk: if you have no technical team and no one to maintain this after it’s built, you’ll be stuck when it inevitably breaks.
Option 2: Use an iPaaS (Integration Platform as a Service)
Tools like Zapier, Make, or Tray.io let customers connect your app to others through visual interfaces. This is fast—you can launch in days, not weeks—and works well when integration workflows are simple and standardized. Think “when X happens, create Y” type automations.
You’ll pay $0-$500/month in platform fees plus per-task costs that can scale up fast with volume. Choose this for speed when you’re okay with customers doing some setup themselves. Skip it if you need real-time sync or complex data transformation.
Option 3: Use a Unified API provider
Services like Merge, Finch, or Apideck give you one API to connect to multiple similar tools. Instead of separate Salesforce, HubSpot, and Pipedrive integrations, you write code once and it works across all CRMs they support.
This makes sense when you need to support 5+ tools in the same category and have a technical team who can work with APIs. You’ll pay $500-$2K/month plus per-connection fees. Don’t choose this if you only need 1-2 integrations total.
The decision framework is simpler than you think
Start with one question: How many integrations do you ultimately need? If it’s 1-3 total, build in-house or hire an agency. If it’s 3-10 with simple workflows, go with iPaaS. If it’s 10+ in the same category, consider unified APIs.
Then ask: Do I have technical capacity to maintain this? No technical team means iPaaS or agency. Technical team but swamped means unified API or agency. Technical team with bandwidth can build in-house.
The trap to avoid: don’t build in-house just because “it seems cheaper.” If you hire a contractor for $10K to build an integration, they disappear, and six months later it breaks, you’ll spend another $5K finding someone to fix it. Factor in lifetime maintenance costs, not just initial build.
Sarah chose to build Slack in-house because her developer had Slack API experience. For Jira—more complex, deeper data model—she hired VeryCreatives. Total cost was less than hiring a senior dev for three months, and both integrations shipped in eight weeks.
What “good enough” looks like: The Minimum Viable Integration
The mistake most founders make: they think integration equals feature parity with the native app. Wrong. Your first version should do one thing reliably that saves users meaningful time or unlocks a deal.
This perfectionism kills momentum. You start researching every possible feature the integration could have. Should it sync custom fields? What about attachments? Historical data? Two-way sync? Webhooks vs polling? Before you know it, you’re designing an enterprise-grade integration that will take six months to build.
Meanwhile, your competitor ships a basic version in four weeks and starts closing the deals you’ve been losing.
The counterintuitive truth: customers don’t want perfect integrations. They want their specific problem solved. A prospect asking for “Salesforce integration” isn’t asking for full CRM replication. They want leads from your app to show up in Salesforce so their sales team doesn’t have to do double-entry. That’s it.
Start with the absolute minimum
v1 should include exactly four things, nothing more: authentication that works without making users feel stupid, one core workflow that eliminates their biggest pain point, error handling that tells users what went wrong (not just silent failure), and an admin toggle so you can disable it company-wide if something breaks.
Everything else is v2 or later. Complex field mapping where you try to sync 50 different data points? Start with 5 essential fields. Bi-directional sync that keeps everything in perfect harmony? Pick one direction and nail it first. Real-time sync that updates instantly? Batch sync every 15 minutes is fine for most use cases. Historical data import that brings in two years of existing records? Sync new data going forward only.
The psychological trap here is that you’ll feel like you’re shipping something incomplete. You are. That’s the point. Incomplete but working beats complete but never shipped.
How to define your “one thing”
Go back to why you picked this integration in the first place. If it showed up in your acquisition research, what specific deal blocker does it remove? If it came from retention research, what manual process does it eliminate? Write that down in one sentence.
Then work backwards from the user’s workflow. Don’t think about what the API can do—think about what the user needs to happen. A customer support agent gets a bug report in your app and needs it to become a ticket in Zendesk with the right priority and customer context. That’s the workflow. Everything else—ticket assignment rules, custom fields, SLA automation—is nice to have.
The best way to validate your scope: explain the integration to a current customer in 30 seconds. If they nod and say “yes, that would solve my problem,” your scope is right. If they start listing additional requirements, you haven’t focused enough.
The test: can you explain what the integration does in one sentence? If you need three sentences, your scope is too big.
How to brief a developer or agency
Don’t write a 10-page spec. Give them five things: the user story (“As a sales rep, I want leads from our app to appear in Salesforce automatically so I don’t have to manually enter them”), the workflow drawn on paper or in Excalidraw—five boxes and arrows is enough, success criteria (“Sales rep fills out form → Lead appears in Salesforce within 5 minutes → Rep sees confirmation in our app”), the 5 must-have fields listed out, and a link to their API docs.
The user story format forces you to think from the user’s perspective, not the technical implementation. “As a [role], I want [action] so that [benefit].” This keeps everyone focused on the business outcome, not the technical possibilities.
For the workflow diagram, resist the urge to map every possible path and edge case. Draw the happy path only: user does X, system does Y, user sees Z. Five boxes with arrows between them. If you need more than five boxes, you’re trying to solve too many problems at once.
Success criteria should be measurable and time-bound. Not “leads sync to Salesforce” but “leads appear in Salesforce within 5 minutes” and “user sees confirmation message in our app.” This gives the developer clear targets and gives you a way to test if it’s working.
When listing the must-have fields, be ruthless. Yes, Salesforce has 47 standard fields for leads. No, you don’t need to sync all of them. Pick the 5 that your sales team actually uses: email, name, company, lead source, and maybe status. Everything else can wait.
The API docs link should point to the specific endpoint or section you need, not the general documentation homepage. If you want to create Salesforce leads, link directly to their “Create Lead” API documentation. This saves the developer from hunting through 200 pages of docs to find the relevant section.
How to launch and what to measure
Don’t launch to everyone on day one. You will find bugs. The question isn’t whether your integration will break—it’s whether you’ll discover the problems with 5 beta users or 500 angry customers.
Launch in stages, not all at once
Start with internal testing for 1-2 weeks. You and your team should use the integration daily. Try to break it deliberately—feed it bad data, test edge cases, disconnect and reconnect accounts. Document every weird behavior. Most integrations fail on data you didn’t expect, not the happy path you designed for.
Then move to beta testing with 3-5 friendly customers for another 1-2 weeks. Pick customers who specifically asked for this integration, respond quickly to questions, and won’t churn if there’s a bug. Email them directly: “We built the [X] integration you requested. Want to be the first to try it?” Check in daily for the first week. Ask what’s confusing, what’s not working, what they expected to happen that didn’t.
Next comes soft launch for 1-2 weeks more. Enable the integration for any customer who asks, but don’t broadcast it yet. Create a simple setup guide with screenshots and 3-5 steps maximum. Train your support team on the most common questions. Watch for patterns in support tickets.
Only then do the full launch: blog post, email announcement, sales team training, website update. By this point, you’ve already fixed the obvious bugs and know what questions customers will ask.
Track three numbers, not thirty
Don’t build a complex dashboard. You need three metrics that you can check weekly:
Adoption rate: What percentage of eligible customers have connected this integration? Your target at 30 days should be 10-20% of customers who actually use the other tool. If it’s lower, either your setup is too complex or the value isn’t clear to users.
Success rate: What percentage of integration actions complete without errors? Target above 95%. If it’s lower, you have a technical problem that’s damaging trust. Users who hit errors early often never try again.
Business impact: Did this move your primary metric from the strategy section? For acquisition, track time from “integration mention” to deal close for relevant deals. For retention, compare churn rates between connected and non-connected customers. For expansion, measure upgrade rates or usage increases among connected accounts.
The key is picking ONE business metric that matters, not trying to measure everything. Sarah tracked close rate on deals that mentioned Slack integration. It went from 40% to 65% within 60 days. That’s the number that convinced her to keep building integrations.
Know what good looks like
Set realistic benchmarks for 30, 60, and 90 days. At 30 days, expect 10-20% adoption among eligible customers, above 90% success rate, and some early signal that your primary metric is improving. At 60 days, push adoption to 25-35%, get success rate above 95%, and have 3-5 solid data points on business impact. At 90 days, aim for 30-50% adoption, maintain 95%+ success rate, and have statistically meaningful movement on your primary metric.
If you’re not hitting these benchmarks, you have one of three problems: customers don’t know about the integration or setup is too hard (adoption problem), the integration keeps breaking (technical problem), or it doesn’t actually solve a painful problem (value problem).
Maintenance that prevents disasters
Subscribe to the partner’s API changelog and add deprecation dates to your calendar with 60-day warnings. Most platforms give you 6-12 months notice before breaking changes. Don’t panic when they announce updates—you usually have plenty of time to adapt.
Build a relationship with their developer relations or partnerships team early. A simple intro email can save hours when you hit weird bugs later. Ask for an escalation contact for when things break.
Have a backup plan for when their API goes down. Make sure a broken integration doesn’t break your entire app. Users should still be able to use your core product even if the integration is temporarily offline.
Check monthly how much time you’re spending on integration support and maintenance. If it’s more than 5 hours per month and adoption is low, consider deprecating it. Not every integration needs to live forever.
When to build your next integration
Wait until your first integration hits 30%+ adoption and is stable—above 95% success rate with less than 2 hours per month in maintenance time. Then start the process again with your second integration. Don’t build all 3 in parallel. You’ll split your focus and ship nothing well.
The temptation is to start multiple integrations simultaneously because “we can work on different ones in parallel.” This almost always backfires. Each integration has unique quirks, edge cases, and partner relationship dynamics. When you’re juggling three integrations and two of them hit problems the same week, you’ll be overwhelmed.
Build sequentially. Ship one well, let it stabilize, then start the next. This approach also gives you better learning between integrations. The authentication patterns you figure out for integration #1 can be reused for #2. The error handling approach you perfect on integration #2 makes #3 faster.
Most importantly, sequential building gives you credible momentum with customers and investors. “We shipped our Slack integration last month, Salesforce integration launches next week, and Jira is in development” sounds much better than “We’re working on three integrations” for six months straight.
Your 90-day integration roadmap
The difference between founders who ship integrations and founders who get stuck in analysis paralysis comes down to three decisions: picking one clear goal instead of trying to solve everything, choosing 3 integrations based on real signals instead of guessing, and shipping minimum viable versions instead of waiting for perfection.
Most of this work you can do yourself. Set aside 4 hours next week: 2 hours to run through the prioritization framework and pick your goal, 2 hours to source candidates and create your 2×2 matrix. By Friday, you should know exactly which 3 integrations to build and whether to build them in-house, use an iPaaS, or hire help.
The execution part—building and shipping—is where most non-technical founders get stuck. You can spend months trying to find the right contractor, explaining requirements, debugging issues, and managing the project. Or you can work with a team that’s built 100+ integrations and ships your first one in 3-4 weeks.
If you want help with the strategy, the build, or just an honest assessment of your specific situation, book a free 30-minute diagnostic call. We’ll look at your integrations, timeline, and technical capacity, then tell you the best path forward. No sales pitch—just straightforward advice from people who’ve been through this process dozens of times.
