Welcome to another edition of “startup spotlight”, a content series that gives you the inside scoop on how startups build their customer-facing integrations and take them to market. 

Today we’re highlighting how Apiday—a sustainability platform that enables companies across sizes and industries to collect, analyze, and report on their environmental, social, and governance data (ESG data)—builds, sells, and markets their integrations successfully based on our interview with Corneille Marechal, Apiday’s Data Team Lead. 

You can read on to see what he shared!

1. Why does Apiday need integrations?

Apiday is an ESG Data Management Platform; therefore, one of the key value propositions of our product is that we help users collect various types of ESG data. This consists of employee data that allows them to calculate KPIs under the social pillar, such as the gender pay gap, the percentage of women who work at the company, etc.; and it includes spend-related data that falls under the environmental pillar, such as fuel spending, electricity bills, technology device investments, etc.

Customers can provide both types of data through a questionnaire or by integrating with their HRIS and accounting systems and collecting the data automatically. Since the latter is much easier and more scalable for clients, we knew that it was critical to provide integrations.

2. Can you walk us through your journey in building integrations?

We began implementing integrations quite early on.

One of our first clients was using BambooHR as their HRIS, so our engineers went through the process of building an integration with that platform.

We quickly learned that building to BambooHR’s API was anything but easy. Our in-house engineers had to dedicate significant time to reading through their documentation, implementing the code, testing the connection, and so on. 

We knew we’d need to offer many more HRIS and accounting integrations over time and couldn’t afford to allocate our limited developer resources on integration projects, so we decided to pivot and outsource our integrations to a 3rd-party (Merge). 

The decision to work with Merge has quickly paid off; we now cover nearly all of the HRIS and accounting integrations our clients and prospects want, and our engineers don’t have to worry about building and maintaining our integrations.

3. How do you market your integrations?

We’ve taken a few different approaches. 

We’ve promoted the integrations on our social channels, such as Linkedin, and have taken a few additional steps to make these posts engaging. 

For example, we created a gif and leveraged it on social posts to show how you can access and implement integrations in our product. This is not only helpful from an engagement standpoint (gifs perform better than static images on social!) but it also helps our clients and prospects understand just how easy it is to set up their integrations.

We also highlighted the number of integrations we offer on our homepage to reassure prospects that we can meet their integration needs and that our platform is easy to use.

And we’ve included an integrations tab on our site’s main navigation, which takes visitors to an integration marketplace that breaks down the integrations we offer by different software categories. 

This helps visitors browse through our integrations and quickly confirm that we support the ones they care about.

4. How do you sell your integrations?

Our integrations appeal to every prospect, so our sales reps showcase our integrations and the ease of setting them up in our product on every single demo call. And while I can’t provide specific quantitative benefits from promoting the integrations during the sales cycle, we’re very confident that they’ve helped us close more deals, faster.

We also made the decision to include our integrations as part of our platform fee. In other words, they’re “free”. The reason behind this is that we want to encourage clients to adopt our integrations, because once they do, they’ll experience less friction in adopting and using our platform. Over time, we believe this will translate to more renewals—leading our investment in Merge to quickly pay for itself.

That said, for integration requests that fall outside the scope of Merge’s Unified API, we charge an additional fee per integration, and we tell clients that it’ll take at least 2 weeks to build it. 

5. How do you onboard clients to your integrations? 

Once a client signs on with us and they don’t already have plans to implement an integration, we’ll review their technology stack and see if they could easily set up an HRIS and/or accounting integration. Assuming they can, the process is fairly intuitive and straightforward. Within our product, they can simply follow a few steps with Merge Link. 

The ease of onboarding through Merge Link makes it easier for us to increase integration adoption and, more generally, gives us another opportunity to delight clients. 

Learn more about how Merge can empower your startup to build best-in-class integrations at scale here.