Challenge
When Adam Jacox joined Hatch as VP of Engineering, part of his role was ensuring their platform could scale to handle continued growth. Integrations stood out as an obvious bottleneck.
Hatch's platform relies heavily on data ingested from customers' CRMs and lead source solutions to build out marketing campaigns. The team had been coding bespoke integrations to meet each customer's needs.
A customer would come in and say, 'I need to be able to pull this specific information from my CRM.' And so we would build an integration for them. And then the next customer would come along, same CRM, and ask for different data. And so we would build another one.
Maintaining all of those custom-built integrations was unmanageable. The integrations weren't reliable, and customers reported frequent problems. The team was spending 30-40% of their engineering capacity on integrations and still not keeping up.
Solution
Adam wanted a solution that would allow Hatch to deliver integrations without having to build everything from the ground up.
"I wanted to approach it from the mindset of 'let's focus on our core product, what makes Hatch really special, and then let's try and outsource all the things that we don't need to do.' And I believed one of those things could be integrations," he said.
He and his engineering leaders compiled a list of embedded iPaaS solutions and began building proof of concept integrations.
"One of the things that really set Prismatic apart from the competition was the ground up focus on embedded iPaaS," said Adam.
We explored several other competitors such as Tray and Workato. As we built out POCs with those, we quickly found remnants of these systems being built initially as just straight up iPaaS and trying to move into the embedded iPaaS space. Architecturally they couldn't support some of the core things we needed to do: certain levels of permissioning, certain ways that components or data was shared between systems. Because it wasn't something they set out to do from the get go, they could not support it at the same level that we saw with Prismatic.
They also liked Prismatic's dev-first approach, which gave them more control and flexibility. Their engineers could still write code when needed or build custom connectors to integrate with industry-specific apps like home services CRMs.
After selecting Prismatic, the team got to work moving their legacy integrations to Prismatic, this time as productized, configuration-driven integrations that could be reused across many customers. Then they embedded Prismatic's integration marketplace in the Hatch app so customers could self-serve.
Results
When Hatch launched their integration marketplace and updated integrations, they saw an immediate improvement in reliability.
Customers were excited that they could now configure and self-activate their integrations in the embedded marketplace. This was faster and more accurate than waiting for the Hatch team to do the setup.
New customers now set up their own integrations during onboarding. This lets them configure their integrations to match their own needs, which means the marketing campaigns they run in Hatch using integration data are more successful. Days to onboard has decreased significantly.
Prismatic's management console gives the Hatch team – and their customers – better visibility into the data flowing through the integrations.
It was easier for us to identify the data coming into the system and to add fields. Now we could pull that data in and all of a sudden it was unlocking additional functionality for customers.
All of this has led to fewer support tickets, fewer bug tickets, and increased customer satisfaction. Adam added, "That has contributed to a better experience for our customers, which ultimately I believe helps Hatch retain those customers for longer."
The team has built around a dozen integrations on Prismatic and plans to build more in the coming months. They can now build integrations faster, and Prismatic has offloaded maintenance and scalability concerns. "That has allowed us to then have engineers focus on other areas of the business, which we believe can deliver even more value," said Adam.