What We’ve Learned — Why Build a Marketplace

Building an app ecosystem that delivers

Building an app marketplace has many benefits. It’s no secret that app marketplaces work. With the biggest SaaS providers in the world providing app marketplaces, there is almost no limit to the benefits an app marketplace can bring to your product. The three main benefits from our perspective are the ability to deliver value outside of your product, creating loyalty, and increasing customer acquisition. Let’s go over these now.

Bring Value Beyond Your Product

As a SaaS provider, we are good at providing collaboration software to our customers. It would be short-sighted and naive of us to think that we could provide all of our customer’s needs through software and deliver a great experience, so we can focus on delivering a great video conferencing and collaboration experience.

This is where a marketplace comes in. A marketplace makes it possible to extend the capabilities of what you do well and let others provide new experiences for your customers. Let’s take a look at the Zoom App Marketplace and how we leverage it to expand our customer’s experience to places we couldn’t have gone before.

One of our most requested features is scheduling; being able to schedule a meeting or provide appointment slots for people to be able to schedule time with a Zoom customer. This is where Calendly comes into play. Instead of us trying to provide an excellent scheduling experience, we empowered Calendly to build an app on our platform, and they offer an excellent scheduling experience for Zoom customers.

We also get a lot of requests for learning management system integrations. We have university and colleges that use Zoom to provide remote lecture opportunities. Using the LTI protocol and REST APIs, companies like Absorb LMS can seamlessly offer learning experiences to their students.

Time and time again, we recognize how valuable it is to allow other companies to provide their expertise and solutions as integrations so we can focus on providing a great meeting and collaboration experience.

Create Loyalty

One of the core tenets of Zoom is delivering happiness. As we grow, we always try to deliver happiness in everything that we do. A key part of delivering happiness to our customers is providing them with a great marketplace experience. This allows us to delight our customers by providing solutions through their favorite apps.

Providing REST APIs, SDKs, and other development tools allow customers to develop their integrations even if our marketplace doesn’t already have a specific integration that they are looking for, yet. Being able to remove the barrier allows us to provide that happiness and in turn, we gain a lot of customer loyalty. Delivering this kind of happiness is a key reason to Zoom’s success, and we will continue to destroy barriers like these using our marketplace.

Increase Customer Acquisition

Customers today are increasing their usage of SaaS solutions. As the usage of SaaS products increases, there is a natural fragmentation of these services. It is becoming increasingly important to provide ways for each of these SaaS products to integrate with your solution.

As we work with more customers, we are becoming increasingly aware of their need to integrate all their SaaS products to increase productivity. In some cases, these types of integrations can become sticking points when acquiring a new customer. At Zoom, we work very hard to build our platform to conform to the needs of our customers, so they never have to worry about integrating their other SaaS products with Zoom.

In the end, a marketplace has a myriad of different positives, but the important thing to remember is to listen to your customers and grow with them. If you grow with your customers and listen to their needs, a marketplace is bound to be successful.

Keep a lookout for our next post in this series next week!