From one customer’s request to a reusable platform.
A large customer asked for a custom integration before renewing. Building it just for them would have added one more special case to maintain.
Annual recurring revenue from four new enterprise clients$240,000Same integration · Adopted over six months
The challenge
An HR and payroll company needed its own HR software to send us the list of employees eligible for the benefit, and to check whether they had been reimbursed. Renewal was close. A custom build would meet the deadline, but it would leave us with more one-off work to look after.
What I owned
I was responsible for our API (the way other companies’ software connects to ours) and for how we served large customers. I had to choose between something reusable and a build just for this customer, and agreed timing with sales and the approach with engineering.
The decisions
- Went through a year of customer requests and Customer Success notes. Six of our ten largest customers had asked for some version of the same thing.
- Defined three reusable building blocks: keeping the list of eligible employees up to date, sending an automatic update when something changed, and letting customers check a payment’s status. They covered the original request and about 80% of what the other five customers needed.
- Agreed that details only one customer needed would travel as extra fields, so the core product stayed the same for everyone.
- Gave customers a safe test environment and documentation to set it up on their own, and sold the integration as a paid plan.
What changed
- Four more customers started using the same integration in the next six months, with no extra engineering work.
- Connecting a new customer went from about 6–8 weeks of our team’s time to about two weeks, most of it done by the customer.
- Manual work to update employee lists dropped by about 80%. The conversion rate for enterprise sign-ups grew 40% in six months.
- Those four enterprise customers brought in $240,000 in annual recurring revenue.
Before one customer’s request becomes the roadmap, look for the repeated problem behind it.