Four years ago, we were natively building integrations with point of sale systems into Perkville. An exciting prospect would show interest in our loyalty platform. Great! But then we’d find out they used a system we didn’t integrate with. Wha Whaa. They would either have to use our product manually, a recipe for almost certain churn, or we’d have to integrate with their system which would take a month out of our precious product roadmap.
We looked at subscribing to an integration platform, but they were too costly, and they didn’t have the apps we needed. Our CTO, Adam Easterling, had the crazy idea to build an integration platform from the ground up. Then he made it happen.
After many years of building, refactoring and building again—we’re excited to announce Middle. But how is Middle different from the swath of integration products already out there?
Data
Many integration platform as a service (iPaaS) offerings just pass the data from a to b. Middle stores the data in a relational format so that you can do things like look up a customer in a workflow, see how much they spent on shoes last month and text them a coupon with a platform like Twilio. And you can decide how long to store data based on your needs.
Customization
Many platforms don’t let you access the integration code to customize it to your requirements. Maybe they cover 90% of your use case, but 10% is missing. Sorry, you’re out of luck. Middle gives you access to the integration code so you can get to 100% coverage in case the out-of-the-box app doesn’t handle everything.
Pricing
Because Perkville is so integration heavy, the cost of some of the iPaaS alternatives would have scaled to half of our revenues. Yikes! So we decided to charge differently - just pay for the AWS hardware we provision - use it as much as you want. Upgrade to more powerful hardware when you need it.
Some other key features that help our team are …
Empower our support team to create workflows using a visual programming interface so they can handle customers’ unique integrations requests instead of involving engineering.
Multi-tenancy support so we can separately manage all of our customers’ integrations in our single Middle installation without having to ask them to pay for another service.
Searchability so our support team can find and fix integrations issues without asking engineering to investigate and resolve problems.
Fast-forward four years, and integrations are no longer a bottleneck. We can add apps to Middle in a few days instead of a month. Apps that we add get put into the catalogue for other Middle customers to use. We respond to unique integration requests as well as issues way faster than before. We’re super excited to bring Middle to other companies that depend on integrations to grow. Feel free to schedule time with us if you think Middle can help your business—we’d love to chat.
