Whalesync builds connectors for their data-sync platform

Goals:

• Start building deep integrations with Airtable, Salesforce and Webflow & expand to dozens more
• Cut down time to ship a new integrations from 3 months to 1-2 weeks
• Find an integration partner they can build on top of connectors/infrastructure

Highlight:

• Whalesync’s team was able to create a Webflow connector from scratch using Connector Builder in just a few days vs their old process that lasted 3 months.

Company Overview:

Founded: 2021

Industry: Data Sync

Number of employees: 10

Location: Remote/US

Description

• Whalesync is a Y Combinator & VC-backed company that lets businesses automatically sync their data across mission-critical tools like HubSpot, Salesforce, Airtable, Notion, & Postgres..
• The product makes it easy to manage things like customer data, marketing campaigns, and blog content spread across their SaaS applications without needing to hire software engineers and build a data pipeline.
• Whalesync managed to bring a fresh approach to data sync, unlike Zapier which is able to create simple If/then automations. Their product has capabilities of both going deeper & faster to create 2-way automations. Despite being a young company, companies like Descript ($100m raised) are using them to enhance their automation GTM efforts.

Problem

When Whalesync started out in 2021, they knew they would need a good system for building deep connectors, as they are a core part of their functionality.

Their in-house process of building a new connector would take 3-3.5 months on average, which was very painful & expensive. The reason it took a lot of time is that Whalesync needed to return all the data and all the metadata from each app they connect.

This prompted them to think about using a 3rd party solution which triggered an an extensive market research and evaluation of providers from ETLs (e.g. Singer), Unified APIs (e.g.Merge), Open-source (e.g. Nango) tools out there. They didn’t think anyone else can help them with this problem as all the integration platforms are too shallow - until they learned about Integration.app.

Why integration.app

The main criteria for a successful evaluation were:

• Flexibility of the platform: it needed to fit their existing in-house framework
• Supports bi-directional sync & real-time webhooks
• Extensive support of tables & fields for each API (e.g get Notion page contents, not just databases)
• Ability to build on top of a framework and modify existing connectors
• Reliability: how stable is the provider, how fast can they adapt to changes in APIs
• Speed of adding new integrations without compromising on depth

Using Integration.app, they were able to fill all their technical requirements which none of the other providers were able to match.

To add to the success factors, their product & engineering team needed a fast-support partner and ultimately tipped the balance to choose us.

Implementation with Integration.app

Whalesync’s implementation was a mix match of using our APIs and building generic logic for connectors. Ultimately exposing connectors and letting their users to build the syncs between two apps they need. Some of the functionalities they used:

Whalesync’s implementation was a mix match of using our APIs and building generic logic for connectors. Ultimately exposing connectors and letting their users to build the syncs between two apps they need. Some of the functionalities they used:

• Getting list of data collections from each application.

• Getting the data schema for each collection.

• Real-time notifications about data changes in external applications.

Connector Builder

Whalesync had to create a new Connector that wasn’t built by us from scratch. They built a Webflow connector on their own with full functionality in just a few days.

Starting from defining how Authentication works, to specific data collections they needed using a mix-match of our configuration UI and implementation code.

One of the Whalesync engineers, Lucio highlights a few key aspects about their experience with Connector Builder:

“Importing API documentation automatically, testing tools and ease when using API calls are the biggest 3 factors that save you tons of time.”

“When you are coding the connector, using API calls is way faster than with normal methods, the testing interface is also quite helpful and faster than testing it manually. You can literally plug in a connection and from there using the testing tools is really helpful”, mentioned Lucio.

There are lots of new features upcoming in Connector Builder, including AI suggestions for data mappings and improved functionality for extracting documentation using LLMs. We’re excited to find out how Whalesync and many more customers will be using it in the near term.

What are the benefits for Whalesync?

Whalesync users can now enjoy more connectivity with a click of a button and start building syncs between more apps than before.

Given building connectors is an important facet of their platform, Whalesync is now free to focus on their unique functionality (how data is transformed and synced between applications) rather than on building connectors slowly and tediously.

What’s next?

Whalesync is planning release 20 new high-quality connectors this year (e.g Outreach, Stripe, Zoho & more) via Integration.app.

As the AI capabilities of the connector builder improve, they plan to scale this to hundreds of connectors using Integration.app.

Feel free to check out their product - Whalesync if you want to learn more & see how their integrations look in production.