hotglue

We’ve had an incredible time at SaaStock Dublin. 3 days of learning, networking, meeting with customers, and connecting with future customers. Overall, fantastic trip and a worthwhile investment. So good seeing our friends at Chargebee, Precoro, Commsor ??, Paddle, Deel and Amplemarket Until the next one ??

hotglue (YC S21) has raised $4M in seed funding led by 8VC to help companies easily build native, user-facing SaaS integrations for their customers. hotglue's embedded integration platform helps developers embed user-facing native SaaS integrations into their products with minimal development work, all while allowing the developers to remain in control of the data. It also features a configurable Python-powered transformation layer for devs to control how their product receives customer data. Founded by Hassan Syyid and David M. near the end of 2020, Hotglue now has 65 clients across the US, Europe, India, and South America. The main sectors Hotglue focuses on are customer relationship management, accounting, and e-commerce tools. Congrats to the team on the round! https://lnkd.in/gH6D85AS

I am proud to announce hotglue's $4 million seed round led by 8VC with participation from Y Combinator, Correlation Ventures, Wayfinder Ventures, and TDF Ventures. When we went through YC in 2021, we quickly realized we had stumbled onto a massive problem that needs solving: integrations are hard to build, but they're absolutely essential to so many SaaS companies. Three years in and we've found the problem is even larger than we could have imagined, and hotglue has been able to help so many companies solve that problem. With this new round of funding, we are doubling down on building the premier embedded integration platform, and helping companies of all sizes build quality integrations. Thank you to our amazing customers, our team, and our investors for all the support throughout this amazing journey. Special shout out to Asanka Jayasuriya for betting on us and the potential of hotglue, and to our pre-seed investors Yuri Sagalov, Andrew Miklas, and Jamie Quint for all their help over the years. David M. and I are so excited for what the future holds. Read more about the raise: https://lnkd.in/eAgab_tx

?? Product Leaders ?? What are your thoughts on this? It may surprise you - but we tend to agree with this founder's sentiment. Put frankly, we see too many integration tools failing to meet the needs of their customers. So we wrote a piece on this topic and it's been resonating with product leaders, developers, and executive leaders for various reasons - but we want to know you think. Do you agree? Disagree? Have you found a middle ground?

The MOST important warning we can share with product/dev teams evaluating embedded iPaaS tools: Know "WHY" you're choosing a unified API, a workflow builder, or a code-first embedded ETL tool. Too many teams share their stories of buyer remorse - so we want to help you know what to avoid. Here are 2 examples of what that can look like: Unified APIs don't work for CRMs. Too many teams purchase unified APIs hoping to have fast, deployable integrations...only to hit setbacks since they don't natively support custom objects, fields, or relationships. This basically eliminates 90% of B2B Salesforce users. ...but you won't know this until you've purchased and stuck in a contract. Workflow builders handle custom objects/fields better than unified APIs - but they're more focused on events-driven use cases. These are great for simple triggers like sending notifications from Salesforce to Slack - but teams get frustrated and restricted by the lack of depth offered in these types of connectors. It's so important for product/dev teams to really think through their integration strategy. hotglue takes a very different approach by being code-first. So if you're thinking about embedded iPaaS, just remember: Simple ≠ Best Fast ≠ Best Easy ≠ Best Customization, flexibility, and scalability of your integrations = Best

the hotglue team is taking off ?? Every year we take time to connect as a team somewhere around the world. Last year - Costa Rica This year - Spain Being a fully remote company (representing 4 countries), we value this time together immensely. We can work all day on building a great product, but if we don't care for the people we're doing it with, it doesn't matter. Relationships are everything. Employee relationships. Customer relationships. There's a lot of exciting content planned while we're together, so stay tuned ??

G2 just dropped their fall badges, giving us another reason to celebrate as we wrap up Q3. We hit some major milestones this quarter - and as an early-stage startup serving large enterprises, none of them would've been possible without you! Thank you for your constant support. Now let's make Q4 even better. ?? #embeddedipaas #ipaas #integrations

We shared a recent report saying embedded integrations were going to be the difference maker in SaaS orgs moving forward. Which forces the questions: ?? -> Do you have an integration strategy? -> How do you sustainably build integrations??(in-house or embedded iPaaS) -> When does it make sense to integrate versus not integrate -> Do you own the integration or push it on customers to set up via Zapier? -> Is your integration roadmap being deployed on time? Or is sitting in a backlog that's knee-deep? There are so many different dimensions to integrations that are important to work through. In the end, your long-term strategy needs to align with the solution you choose. So ask the hard questions. Ask us the hard questions. We want you to be confident in knowing how your integrations are going to drive revenue going into 2025. ?? #embeddedipaas #ipaas #integrations

The goalpost of reaching product market fit at $1M ARR has come to an end. Due to market shifts, inflated valuations, and limited capital investments, that $1M ARR benchmark is now closer to $5M ARR - creating all kinds of challenges for start-ups. That said, G2 made a really interesting point in their Buyer Behavior Report, which was the prediction that the biggest differentiator between the startups who win vs those who lose, will be decided by integrations - and we agree. Sangram Vajre also talked about this topic at INBOUND earlier this month. If startups are going to succeed, there MUST be greater alignment between GTM and Product teams. Especially around their integration roadmap. We see companies working through this challenge every day. What integration do we build next? How long will it take? Which integration will lead to more revenue? Do we build in-house or use an embedded iPaaS tool? What's the trade-off? There are 2 key factors every product leader needs to consider when developing their integration roadmap. So we wrote about it. How do I align Product with GTM How do I connect product to the company's unit economics Check it out. https://lnkd.in/eNXnsyGJ

YIKES! ?? The average number of vendors a buyer evaluates before making a decision is between 5-7. ?? -> Is your product actually that much different than 5 of your competitors? -> How do you stand out in that evaluation process? -> Why would the buyer purchase from you and not someone else? Hard questions to answer...and the truth is... the evaluation process is exhausting. Tech evals are confusing, frustrating, and time consuming. Take iPaaS as an example. As of 2024, there are > 100 iPaaS tools on the market. ?? That's a nightmare for our buyer. So we have to help buyers break things down: -> Do they need ipaas or embedded ipass? -> Do they need a workflow builder or something more customizable? -> Do they want no-code/low-code or do they need a code-first option? The questions go on and on...but this is a difficult process for buyers to navigate. The challenge in b2b SaaS is that we love using similar talk tracks, buzzwords, copy, and images. Making things even worse for our buyers! Why do we do this?! In uber-competitive markets, we have to get better at differentiating what we do best and who we're for. We owe it to our customers and future customers. Otherwise, choice paralysis will hurt everyone. Because of that, hotglue's focused on helping buyers know what to ask when they're evaluating these tools. So we wrote a best practice guide for Product Leaders. Enjoy. https://lnkd.in/eyh2TNp7