Ampersand

We’re excited to unveil our product and launch our developer docs today. Ampersand is a developer platform to power the next generation of SaaS - through configurable and scalable user-facing integrations. Alongside our launch, we’re announcing $4.7M in seed funding, led by Matrix Partners (read TechCrunch’s coverage of our funding here: https://lnkd.in/gNJkfPSw). We’ve been quietly working with a few early partners, and are expanding our Early Access Program to more companies. If your company is building Salesforce or Hubspot integrations, and want to chat about how we can help, please fill out this short form: https://lnkd.in/gVUeZSGv We’re also growing our team to add a few Founding Engineers. If you’d like to go on this adventure with us, please apply here (https://lnkd.in/gPhTEQnW) or reach out at [email protected].

I’ve gotten a lot of new followers recently, and rather than write greeting cards to each one of you, I thought I’d introduce myself here and talk about why we created Ampersand. The elephant in the SaaS (and now AI) room is that almost every company’s product and GTM strategy involves deep and custom integrations. But, as I’ve learned many times over the last decade, dealing with those integrations is a massive, gigantic headache. ???????????????????? ?????? ??????????????????????. Making two apps talk to each other, consistently, while reflecting all their custom configurations and customizations, sucks. So most companies do take a strategy of: 1. Pick an overworked engineer, or a team of engineers, to manage their critical integrations AND/OR 2. Use an integration platform. And those of you who have chosen option 2 know that it really isn’t any better than option 1. The problem with integration platforms is that they overpromise and under-deliver. They don't go the distance and deal with the last-mile edge cases — the devil is in the details, after all. They don't guarantee outcomes. The final product experience building with these platforms remains terrible. So despite paying top-tier $, buyers of these products remain unsatisfied. So we created Ampersand. Our goals: - ensure successful outcomes - hyper-focus on the GTM stack (with the CRM at its center) - go the deepest - ensure your integrations are scaling with your growing customer base - architect with extensibility at its core - make developers happy - great pricing This is really personal to me. It stems from my PTSD of living with this crazy problem for 7 years over the last two companies I worked at. One I founded as the CTO (Siftery), and the other I was an exec/VPE (G2). It didn’t make a difference if we were a startup or a big company! No matter how hard I tried at each, custom product integrations remained a soul-sucking problem. I am certain product integrations are killing global developer productivity by a huge margin. As AI creates more applications, things are going to get worse. So, my co-founder Lauren and I started working together in late 2022. “But you just launched a few weeks ago!” you might say. Great observation. We took a lot of time to ensure we were approaching the problem right, not just creating “one more integrations platform that doesn't work”. We all have seen that xkcd comic. We stayed in customer discovery for 6+ months — we didn't rush it. And after that, we didn’t even launch for another 14 months. We started building and onboarding early adopters, raised capital from long-term aligned investors, and built a killer founding team. Our thinking: the more time we can spend figuring this out, the less time our customers pay in integration hell. We ensured we could guarantee outcomes. THEN we launched. Non-traditional, but hey, it seems to be working for us. DM me, or check out links in the comments to know more.

Should you do it any differently for a developer product? Yes, if you don't like developers.

Hello world!

Our co-founder and CTO Lauren Long does a technical deep dive of Ampersand's integration orchestration engine on the latest episode of Software Engineering Daily.

Our co-founder Lauren will be speaking at POST/CON next week about the building blocks of API Experience Design, and how we apply them at Ampersand.