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Alex Papageorge

Building products on others products

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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 🤣

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Nolwen Dupond
Well a lot of platform have open API for it as it bring value to the platform to have extra maker products.
Fabian Maume
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.
Anamika Chaudhary
I have always wondered about the same thing specially from the technical standpoint. Would love to hear from others who have done this.
Pranav🚀
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.