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independence5 unconnected · 1 more author in those circles
standing

contested · 9 claims against 1

applies to

b2b, no audience needed

confidence

high

evidence

10 claims · 8 articles · 4 receipts

window

2021-06-01 → 2026-04-15

5 builders who never spoke to each other · contested

Make integrations the distribution plan

Build the connections to the tools your customers already live in, cover the most used ones yourself and open an API so other people build the rest, with a free tier of that API routing developers toward the paid one. Every integration widens the addressable market and raises the cost of leaving, though a customer base fragmented across many tools can make the same strategy unworkable for one person.

Where this splits

Integrations are treated as the growth channel that decides purchases, while one solo builder found a fragmented customer base each wanting their own integration made the platform approach impossible to sustain.

9 claims against 1

Arvid Kahl · Corey Haines · Cory Zue · George Levin · Josh Nicholson · Luca Restagno

Treat integrations as the growth and distribution channel

  1. 01Treat signing new integration partners as a growth channel, because integrations decide purchases and each one widens the market you can address.
  2. 02Treat integrations as the distribution plan: cover the most used tools yourself first, then open an API so other people build the rest.
the objection · 1 claimLuca Restagno

A fragmented customer base makes the platform approach unworkable

A fragmented customer base each wants integrations for their own situation, which is what makes a broad platform unworkable for one person.

  1. 03Push data into the tools people already keep their work in rather than asking them to adopt a new home for it.
  2. 04Offer a free public API on basic data as an entry point that routes developers toward the paid comprehensive tier.
  3. 05Build the onboarding cost into your retention story: once a customer has gone through the work of loading all their content, the effort of moving to a competitor is what keeps them, and integrating into the tool their team already lives in raises that cost further.

What it returned

  • 50

    Eight integrations already live, among them Notion, HubSpot, Jira and Obsidian, with a stated target of the 50 biggest productivity tools before opening an API and a marketplace.

  • Haines ran partnership building as a named growth strategy at Baremetrics, a product whose core analytics cannot function without ingesting data from Stripe.

  • Early users kept asking to send captured notes into Notion and Obsidian; shipping the Notion integration was followed by a marked rise in new users.

  • Zue names Scriv's tight Slack integration as both a differentiator few competitors have and a source of switching cost

Sources

the second source

Three plays a week, for the phase you are in

No roundup of links, no news. Three tactics more than one builder arrived at separately, with the numbers each one returned and the disagreements left in.

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More in partnerships

all partnerships plays

the second source

Three plays a week, for the phase you are in

No roundup of links, no news. Three tactics more than one builder arrived at separately, with the numbers each one returned and the disagreements left in.

963 corroborated plays to draw from · 3 a week

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