Building products on others products
Alex Papageorge
4 replies
I've seen more and more products built on (or for specific) platforms, such as LinkedIn and Salesforce.
Example: Loom existing on my Gmail.
How do these product's leverage these established platforms/tech?
Does it require open APIs? Open Source? Or are they reaching agreements with said companies?
If anyone can share any insight, it would be much appreciated! My partner and I are building a product, but we had the idea to become an extension/enhancement to Salesforce specifically. We've seen other makers do the same. Problem is, we're flying a little blind into understand what exactly goes into this partnership? Or if we're just overthinking it 🤣
Replies
Fabian Maume@fabian_maume
Warmup Inbox
It depends.
There are 2 ways to build products on top of another:
- Leverage the API. Most of google products like gmail, chrome & google sheet have open APIs which is quite easy to leverage.
- Some platform like linkedin have closed API, so to build product on top you need to use web-scaping. As an example: QApop (that I created), is buit on top of Quora by leveraging webscraping.
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Well a lot of platform have open API for it as it bring value to the platform to have extra maker products.
I have always wondered about the same thing specially from the technical standpoint. Would love to hear from others who have done this.
I would be cautious doing that. But, some products are just very huge to risk building on them. Ex: A WhatsApp newsletter tool, a dating extension for twitter. These solutions will be awesome with an API and worth a try w/o API as well because of huge audiences.