IFTTT 2020 Kickoff

A massive new market is taking shape to help businesses build and manage their customer-facing integrations. We believe 2020 is the year this market takes off. The following is an email sent to the IFTTT team to kickoff what is sure to be a very exciting year for us.

IFTTTers,

CES is always a hectic and exciting way to start the year. Amid the countless customer conversations, booth walk-throughs and meetings, one thing became increasingly clear: 2020 is our year.

Why should we be so big & bold? We have the right product, a trusted brand and an amazing team. Though most importantly, the market is ready: businesses know to remain relevant, they need an integrated ecosystem and they’re eager to partner with an integration platform instead of investing in their own or building one-off bespoke integrations…

..but only if we can provide a 10x better alternative and help them understand why they are spending millions on platforms and integrations in the first place.

To hear that our customers are already spending so much on something that they don’t quantifiably value may be surprising. Yet, that is exactly what customer after customer has revealed when pressed. Here is a non-exhaustive list of the answers we’ve heard about why platforms and integrations are important:

• “Our customers expect compatibility”
• “Our competitors are doing it”
• “We will eventually be the dominant smart home, automotive, etc. hub”
• “It’s why we connected our product to the internet in the first place”
• “We want to be innovative”
• “It will bring new revenue streams”
• “More data makes our product/algorithm smarter”
• “Integrations help us create new experiences”

None of these are wrong answers and many of them could easily lead to a better understanding of the business value that platforms and integrations provide. What is surprising are the follow up answers that most customers have when asked to quantify that value in terms of a real business goal: money, time, retention, engagement. The most common response to these follow up questions is: “We don’t know”

Thus far it’s been easy enough to convince customers that are already building integrations that IFTTT can help them do it more efficiently. However, it will be an uphill struggle if we only help businesses save money on an activity that isn’t fully understood or valued internally. We are driven to help our customers achieve this clarity; it will be our biggest challenge in 2020 and leads directly to one of our 2020 Principles.

Build Engaging Engagement Tools

Integrations are just product features that involve another service. Product features help services engage their users in ways that create additional value for both users and services. Users get a product that works better or solves a new problem, services get a stronger relationship with their users that ultimately affects their bottom line. Our customers should want to build integrations for the exact same reasons they build product features: increased user engagement that moves the needle on their business goals.

It’s important to note that “engagement” is a catch all term, not unlike “revenue”. Every business wants more of it, but it comes in many shapes and sizes. Engagement must be defined more granularly, and on a per customer basis, for us to create the biggest impact for their business. Banks may want their customers to move $N more into savings each year. Smart home products might want to up-sell X more customers to their premium service offerings each quarter. Insurance companies may want to keep Y more customers from churning each month.

To better align IFTTT with these customer goals, we first have to understand those goals in as much detail as possible. Who owns this goal? What happens if they don’t hit it? What % contribution is IFTTT making towards hitting this goal? Only after we have the answers to questions like these can we successfully convince our customers to adapt their own product development process to include integrations alongside new features.

Getting any business to change how they work is a big ask, but one that nearly every successful SaaS or PaaS company requires. The best products literally change the way their customers work. AWS radically alters the composition of an engineering team, Slack helps organizations send less email, Chartio enables anyone to be a data analyst.

In 2020 our customers won’t “be on IFTTT”, instead they will “be using IFTTT” on a regular and increasing basis to bring valuable integrations to their users. We have a massive opportunity to evolve our product and our pitch to stimulate this process within our customer’s organization. Any business that cares about how their users engage with their own products should in turn be highly engaged with IFTTT.

The Integration Development Process

Connect > Learn > Grow is the distillation of what could also be called an “Integration Development Process”. It represents the true potential of the value IFTTT can provide. The better we get at articulating and improving each stage of this process, the more impact we have for our customers.

Connect — Integrate your service with IFTTT and publish for other services and users. Build new Connections and Applets. Add more Triggers, Queries and Actions. Improve Connections based on updates to other services. There is no limit to what can be connected with IFTTT, especially when we start going beyond just “service to service” connections and bring to market new ways to aggregate data and functionality across services as well.

Learn — Understand how your published service and connections are performing and how you could make them better. Research what devices and services users are adopting and how they are using them. Track what services your power users are integrating on their own. Learn who your users are and what problems they are facing to better align your product and integration roadmap. Manage requests for exclusive partnerships with other services or compare the performance of your service to competitors and best-in-class benchmarks. IFTTT not only helps you identify and build your most important integrations, it also helps you build them much faster.

Grow — This is where all the value happens for our customers. Whether growth comes from their own published connections or those published by other services on our platform, we’ve got to let them know about it. Enabling customers to pull our data into their own dashboards or bring their goals and metrics into the IFTTT platform are both ways to connect engagement growth back to core business goals. When our customer’s key stakeholders hit their goals, we do too. Growing their business encourages them to go back to Connect or Learn, which ultimately aligns our business with theirs.

Driven to succeed

CES was an incredible way to kick off 2020 with the validation that we are on the right track. Achieving lift off is only a matter of making our values a part of your own:

• We are Positive. Candid communication and open collaboration are the keys to great results.
• We are always Learning. We bring a curious mindset to every decision and every mistake.
• We take Pride in our craft. Enough said.
• We are Driven to do what it takes to achieve our own definition of success.
• We think Big and Bold. No goal is too lofty. We plan and pursue them with that in mind.

Our goal for 2020 is to become the essential integration and discovery platform for businesses to continuously connect, grow and maximize the value of their customers.

Let’s do this!