Zoom App Marketplace — What we learned and where we’re going

At Zoom, the needs of our customers are always at the forefront of our minds, and we pride ourselves on being responsive to their requests. So when Zoom grew into a viable player in the collaboration/meeting space, a number of our users asked for connectivity into other platforms and services, such as Slack, Zendesk, and Workplace by Facebook, to have seamless end-to-end solutions. And, as usual, we responded quickly.

While we built many of the standard connectors ourselves, we quickly realized that this model was unscalable. We also noted that a number of our partners, customers, and third-party developers use our APIs/SDKs on a large scale, solving connectivity issues themselves. However, they did not have a place to publish their solutions so that other Zoom customers could discover and access them. Since a robust foundational ecosystem is essential for any company to survive and grow in the long run, the obvious answer was the Zoom App Marketplace.

The framework

We focused on developing a robust framework early on that adapts itself to accommodate the workflows and business processes around our Marketplace. The foundational framework needed many things to come together. One of our primary concerns was avoiding scaling problems, so we concentrated on creating a solid tech stack and engineering architecture. Equally important was to establish the app life cycle, with transparent workflows around the framework, such as developer flow, publisher flow, and approval flow. We also put together the end to end business/validation process, updated end-user license agreements (EULAs), and created developer-specific legal agreements.

Value and security

From day one, we wanted to ensure that every app published on our Marketplace created value for at least a subset of our customers (our reject rate is about 65%). But more importantly, users needed to trust these apps. Because our customers use these apps, we developed a rigorous process around security-focused testing and validation. For example, we prevent apps from pulling customer or end-user data without explicit consent and approval. Also, any collected data must be removed when they delete the app. Making sure your customers know that their data security is important to you is paramount to the success of a scalable platform. We always put our customer’s data first and encourage all platforms to do the same.

Developer documentation and forums

Two critical elements of any platform are developer documentation and user forums. We spent a significant amount of time identifying and evaluating tools to host our documentation, establishing developer forums, and connecting them to our marketplace framework. We tried hosting the documentation ourselves with WordPress on our servers, but it slowed us down. Moving to a third-party doc hosting platform allowed us to move faster and not have the additional hassle during product releases delivering an exceptional user experience.

The same process happened with our forum. While these changes took time as we had to refactor our docs when we moved them across hosting frameworks, we needed to create an excellent experience for our developers. It was worth the cost, however, and we highly recommend providing a public place that allows you to communicate with your developers and/or end-users openly and honestly.

We also heard from customers that we needed a clearer developer documentation structure. They were correct, and we should have done a better job from the start. Inadequate and incorrect documentation on the API semantics, interfaces, and ambiguous terminology result in more support calls and frustration that builds up. It is an excellent investment to spend time and resources on it early in the cycle. We listened to our developer’s feedback and improved our documentation. This ongoing process requires a significant investment, but we learned it is worth the time to invest in thoughtful and intelligent documentation.

App validation

To ensure a consistent process for app validation, we created a single method and workflow for approving all apps, whether developed internally at Zoom or by third parties, the process, and validation criteria are the same. We made sure that developers were aware of the process well in advance of the submission of their app for approval. This created a transparent workflow that allows us to deliver high-quality apps to our customers and keep our developers happy with a transparent process. While this created some friction early on, we believe that value exists within consistency because our customers demand high-quality apps.

Insights

We cannot emphasize strongly enough how critical it is to build the data models and dashboards to track the KPIs on how the platform performs for both developers and end-users. This type of reliable data is necessary to determine where to focus on business decisions. Even when the data is available, it must be extracted, analyzed, and visualized in real-time and on-demand. We have built these insights into our framework. The developer relations team needs to have this data at their fingertips to make data-driven decisions.

Clear sample apps, case studies, libraries, and versioning

We are working hard to improve in this area. While it requires significant resource commitments, it is a priority for us going forward; we have several demo apps in our Github and have started building vertical case studies.

In hindsight, we realize that we should have thought through API versioning early on in the platform development cycle because introducing a versioning scheme after the fact involves significant refactoring. The need for language-specific libraries is more and more critical as developer programs grow. Today, developers use many different languages, and providing them with libraries in their native language (NodeJS, Python, C++, etc.) is paramount to the success of any developer platform. We are focused on these areas now and will continue to focus on creating great developer tools.

Monetization

While the revenue aspect of the platform is not an immediate business goal for us, however, we recognize the sustainability of these resources will require monetization business models in the future. Enterprises are always looking for solutions and services that solve their problems. We have found that our largest customers crave better connectors and services that solve their problems or help them monitor their business through real-time data-hoses and pipelines.

Internal Advocacy

It’s essential (more so in the enterprise segments) to prepare and provide continuous training to your company’s cross-functional teams, including sales, sales engineering, customer success, and support. Once an app goes live in the marketplace, your sales and customer success teams should have clear visibility into what business problems the app solves and position these apps in customer engagements. This process should be automated through tooling — you cannot scale this to hundreds and thousands of apps with a manual process.

Commitment

At Zoom, we want to foster the ecosystem for our developers, who rely on us, to provide best-in-class tools and resources to build amazing third-party apps. Results will not occur overnight, so we have a multi-year commitment to creating our Marketplace and platform that delivers and supports what our community requires. To deliver a thriving marketplace, focus on your developers and end-users by providing a seamless and transparent process as possible.