Noah Berk, Aptitude 8: Welcome to UpYourStack podcast. I'm your host, Noah Berk. Every week we feature interviews and conversations with some of our favorite app developers who've either built their apps on HubSpot or have integrated with HubSpot to help you get the most out of your HubSpot tech stack.

And today I have an awesome guest. Dylan who is with Pipedream. And I've been beyond excited to have this conversation. Cause my team has been using Pipedream for quite a long while. Dylan, welcome to the show and yes, absolutely. Thank you so much for being here. And Dylan, maybe we can start off with one, what does Pipedream do? And then two, what's your role at Pipedream?

Dylan Sather, Pipedream: Yeah, the simplest answer is Pipedream helps you automate anything and we'll obviously dig into a lot of what that but fundamentally we try to help developers specifically build automations for their product, power internal apps, power their core product, anything that talks to an API, anything is fair game.

You could do it on Pipedream. And I am a founder and an engineer here. Thank you. I spent a lot of my time building and then a lot of my time talking to partners and customers. So love the role. Cause I get to do it all. It's the best part of being a founder.

Noah: Hundred percent. Yeah. And Dylan, so maybe we can take a step back here. So really you're connecting applications. So they have an API Pipedream enables those connections and integrations to occur. Who is this for? You mentioned developers, but who is coming to Pipedream and saying, I need Pipedream today. To do X, Y, Z.

Dylan: Yeah, the people who get the most value out of Pipedream are developers or people who love to dig into API APIs. I would say you get the most value out of Pipedream. If you can read an API doc and understand. The power of what you can do with that API HubSpot's a great example. I know we'll talk about that a lot. The people who can, who have the power of imagination and the interest, at least to play around with an API, that's where you get the most value out of Pipedream. So we have a huge spectrum of customers. Most of them are developers, but many are teams that are composed of developers and more non technical people, and they can all.

Work in Pipedream effectively to automate anything.

Noah: Do you need to be a developer to leverage Pipestream? You just mentioned that you don't necessarily have to be one, but is it preferable or does it really not matter?

Dylan: That's right. We build the product and a lot of our features are oriented at we're building we integrate with get deeply because developers want version control for their code, But a lot of non developers also use our get functionality cause they want the backups, right?

So really it is a large spectrum. I would say that. Developers tend to get the most value because they see the nuanced features, they deeply understand what we're abstracting and why we've built these tools, but non developers get tremendous value out of Pipedream. I still like to think about it as if you're API curious, you'll get ton of value out of Pipedream.

Dylan Sather, Pipedream: All you have to be is curious today in the world of AI, and you can fly with Pipedream and other tools.

Noah: So you mentioned, so in other words, using AI to figure out the best way to leverage Pipedream and say, okay, you have the question. You're right. Our developers are using AI all the time to help support their initiatives and efforts. So taking to another question here is our team loves using Pipedream.

It's our go to application for integrations for our clients. But what do you suppose has really led to all this growth and traction over the years? Yeah.

Dylan: Yeah. For us, it really is APIs. We, that, if you plot the number of integrations that we have it starts to multiply the value for So if you think of HubSpot, right? Like we think of pipe driven HubSpot context is it's an extension of HubSpot functionality. You get all the value of.

All the data you have in HubSpot and then that can trigger all these different things in Pyprem that can send the data to different apps. So when we first got started, we had fewer than a hundred integrations. And that was the number one question we got was, well, I use this other tool. I need to integrate with this, right?

Cause I don't know. I have this great idea or I need to sync data between these two systems for a customer. And so that primarily, I would say it's also one of our biggest lead gen both on search, we have pages for every API integration. We acquire a lot of our users via just straight search.

Those pages now that the chat tools like chat GPT have indexed those pages. We also hear a lot of I saw you on chat GPT. Chat

Noah: Oh, wow.

Dylan: Dream is the best way, which we didn't expect at all. But that was funny just because we've built up all this public content on these integrations.

And again I think just as we've added more and more integrations, it expands the use cases that you can use Pipedream for. So that's been a huge driver of growth for us. And then also just continuing to nail, the individual use cases developers bring to us. I just, as a product and an engineering person, that's my favorite part about building a company is, listening deeply to specific customer feedback and thinking about the best product to build.

And it, it took us a while to build what we believe now is the best workflow builder for automated anything. So, it's just, it's a long slog to build up all the functionality that you need, that developers really expect because the tooling is complex. And I think that the tool needs To support that complexity.

Noah: Agreed. And I think one of the questions that a lot of listeners will have, it's like, Hey, if I buy something like HubSpot, it says it has an integration with a net suite. Why would I need a Pipedream versus just using out of the box prebuilt integrations? And I'm sure, obviously if you're a developer, you understand perhaps what you're doing.

But let's just say for the general audience, maybe they don't understand why this is even necessary.

Dylan: Yeah, it's a great question. First and foremost, infinite flexibility and customizability. Most default integrations in all these apps, like HubSpot are meant to solve the 90 percent use case. And that, that satisfies a lot of use cases quite well. I would always recommend to people. If those default integrations work, use them because they're built into the ecosystem.

You don't have to maintain them, right? And you think about it, but inevitably you're going to want to add functionality to that integration that probably doesn't exist. That is the story we see from every customer who comes to Pipedream. am using this integration, but I want this or my customers are asking for this.

So, Pipedream provides the platform to automate anything, to customize those integrations in any way you want. And we've tried to make it as simple as possible, but also give you the flexibility to write code, to extend these API operations or these workflows in any way. So, that is the core use case.

If. If you've evaluated the integration that's built in and it doesn't do exactly what you need, Pipedream's a great fit.

Noah: Yeah. And I have to back up what you say here, because oftentimes we come across situations to your point that maybe at first the out of the box integration worked really well. They're trying to do more than just that. And, we tend to think of them as edge cases. Our edge cases tend to be most cases at this point.

And that's a tool like Pipedream, you know, immediately makes sense for us to build exactly what the client wants to be able to bring that data in. And, so I guess one of my questions is. Why start this company in the first place? There's other tools out there that will integrate from one application to the next.

Why start this company? And then how do you differentiate from those other companies who may be offering on the surface what looks to be a similar solution?

Dylan: Yeah, it's a great question. When we started the company, the tools that solve these problems primarily fell into two categories. are no code tools like Zapier and make, and then there are full code tools like the AWS ecosystem, or, you roll your own on a server. And they're both great for certain use cases.

What we consistently heard when we were first evaluating this idea from again, especially developers or technical people, they wanted the best of both worlds. They didn't want to build the integrations. So they would typically lean on Zapier make or any of these tools, but they often found no code solutions lacking with, again, the customization that you need to apply to these workflows.

So a lot of the no code tools, again, are fantastic for solving very specific use cases or gluing things together in very predictable ways, but the second you need more advanced logic you often. You often lean on code at of the day. That's often the solution because code is expressive.

And if you're a developer or capable of writing code, you know that you can build essentially anything you want, but on the code side, you don't want to maintain that stuff. That's the other trade off. Got to maintain the infrastructure. You've got to do all the integration logic yourself. We tried to take the best of both worlds and build them into one platform.

So we build the integrations. Developers tell us all the time. I don't want to write the code to send a message to Slack or to sync a contact with HubSpot. That is a very standard operation at the same time around the edges of that workflow, I have a lot of custom law, the data that I'm pushing to these tools.

I need to manipulate in some way and I need that, but I don't want to maintain the infrastructure. And that's where Pipedream comes in. The workflow infrastructure we've built. It just provides you everything you need to get started. It's serverless. You don't have to have any infrastructure, right?

You just plug and play. You're ready to go.

Noah: Yeah. And I think especially your target market. If we come back to it and if you're a marketer, you probably have someone your team's a developer or maybe you're working with a partner who has development team and, and they're like, listen, make can't do what we need to get done, and this is where something like Pipedream comes in.

But it could also just be their immediate go to Pipedream. I have a feeling that a lot of organizations like I'd rather start with Pipedream than one of these other tools.

Dylan: Absolutely. You're asking good questions about our target audience because I think that initially we built this platform and are still building the platform for developers, but the end goal is to make it a platform that anyone can use to automate anything. And we're building those abstractions and we're getting there.

It's not perfect today. And I think that there are, there, there are, pieces of the functionality that many marketers or non technical people may find a little advanced, but if you spend the time with it and you're curious enough, you can do absolutely anything. So I always recommend people evaluate Pipedream alongside these other no code tools, because most of what you could do in these tools, Pipedream can do.

And then you get the benefit of everything else. If you're willing to put in the effort to learn it.

Noah: Yeah. So you get that plus more. So it's like rather than having to start from scratch again, and at least you started with Pipedream. Are you noticing there's certain applications that are being leveraged more so than others for these integrations that you're like, wow, if you have like a NetSuite, if you have a Sage intact, if you have something like that, like your first step should be Pipedream.

Dylan: Absolutely. I think that the ones we've spent the most time on, which are the CRM integrations, database integrations, the AI integrations the premier integrations that we've really A lot of the marketing tools, even SMS platforms you go to our website, Pipedream. com slash apps.

You'll see all those integrations and how they work. And so I would say that we've looked intently at the data on usage and it's across the board. absolutely verticals. There's no one vertical where I can say this use case is absolutely the best in pipe terrain, but we don't do well in these other use cases.

I think we do well on a broad set of use cases now. We've been building the platform for six years. Much of that time has been devoted to building these integrations in a way that customers expect them to work. And so I would say that the top tools, the most popular tools, the HubSpots, the Salesforce's every top tool in their category, we have very bespoke integrations for that are very easy to use.

And that's where again customers find value like most customers are probably using You know, one of the top three tools in market. And if you're not, by the way, we're always willing to build out better integrations for the tool that you're using. That's the thing I love about the team. We're still very lean team.

We're very product engineering focused. We care a lot about building the right thing for our customers. So that's the fun part too, is finding a customer that uses a new tool. We don't have a great innovation for, and just asking you, like, how do you want this to work?

Noah: Are there any industries that are off limits? So, for example healthcare with HIPAA data or financial services like a bank or credit union who have PII? Is there any limitation to what you can use a Pipedream to do?

Dylan: no. And we just shipped a HIPAA compliance this year because we had a lot of customers interested in processing PHI for their customers on Pipedream. And, um, we wanted to close that gap. And that is, one of the biggest hurdles from a compliance standpoint, many small companies us. We put in that effort.

We care deeply about security because we don't want those use cases to be off limits. And so there are, definitely healthcare APIs we don't support today. But if again, Shameless plug.

Dylan Sather, Pipedream: If you're using those APIs like

Pipedream we'll integrate it in 24 hours for you. That's the pitch, right?

Noah Berk, Aptitude 8: Let me just stop you there. So if a customer has a particular need that is not yet available with Pipedream, you guys will actually within 24 hours fulfill that requirement.

Dylan: That is the goal. Some integrations take more time, but that is the goal. That is always the goal that we set for.

Noah: That's awesome.

Dylan Sather, Pipedream: to ship it within hours. Now that's. Just to be detailed, that's the basic integration, And then we spend more time building the triggers, the actions and working with you to make sure that's right, but you can get up and running and unblocked typically.

Yes. Within 24 hours, if you have a specific use case that we don't solve.

Noah: Dylan that's so cool. Well, one reason why I ask this question, we work with a lot of companies in the health care space, a lot of companies in the financial services space and what we're seeing in the marketplace, especially in HubSpot. Now that you're able to enable sensitive data inside HubSpot is there's all these services.

Yeah. EHR, all these systems out there, EHR is that you need to connect with these health record systems and other billing systems and we're starting to field those requests. So I think as a listener, it's really cool to hear there are tools out there like a Pipedream that you can now handle the piping of that sensitive data to and from whatever application.

And it sounds like in your space zone, this is going to continue to escalate. You're going to continue to probably see more in this in the healthcare space. Are there any use cases that you wish people would use Pipedream for, but you have yet to see in someone really use it?

Dylan: The biggest challenge we face as a product team and marketing, the tool is a lot of developers use Pipedream to build a prototype very quickly. And then they sometimes build the application internally in production. And they look at Pipedream and the experience is almost too easy. And then this can't scale, right? And it's the typical, very good perspective. Most developers have being skeptical of SAS and being skeptical of the abstractions and not having full control over your code, right?

I wish people would build more production applications on pipe because we do many of the on Pipedream.com. Are powered by Pipedream workflows. So we try to dog food as much as we can, because it's an incredibly, it's beneficial for us because the whole team can collaborate in the tool. And it's not gated on your production engineering team, needing to ship code. That's the, one of the biggest benefits of keeping code That needs to be, especially integration code.

Noah: Yeah.

Dylan: We see a lot of product managers managing this code very successfully. They have offloaded that work from their engineering They're using these integrations in production. They're powering integrations on their site, right? And so it's exactly what we want to see. We want, we wish we saw more of it because I think that we have not done an effective job articulating that Pipedream is ready for those use

So, so we have a lot of work to do on the marketing side there. And that's, it's always the biggest challenge building the tech. It's not easy. But it's at least more natural for us as builders. marketing is by far the biggest challenge.

Noah: And I think your product, it's like with our team, we just evaluated so many different technologies and we fell in love with Pipedream and what your capabilities are. So let's take a step back and talk a little bit about HubSpot. And you alluded to it a little bit earlier.

HubSpot has these out of the box integrations that can work for maybe 80 90 percent of the use case of a particular client. How do you feel like you guys are filling in that gap in the HubSpot ecosystem? We talked about the 10%. Is that kind of where it is? Is that hey, those edge cases within HubSpot?

And are you seeing anything coming out of HubSpot now that you're really excited about in terms of potential integration capabilities that you're like, well, this is going to change the game?

Dylan: Yeah. On the built in versus do I use Pipedream? Right? Like I, I am conceptually always I approach this as a developer thinking through what is going to save you the most time and help you ship the fastest as a company if. You have a single client using a single NetSuite integration, like you said, is a good example. It makes total sense to start with the default and to leverage the great work that HubSpot's done there. As you adopt more use cases, that is where we see the most value of using PyTream, like you said, either for the more custom work or just using it to power every integration you have, even replacing the default built in integration, because you get control in Pipedream over all of your account credentials.

You have all these account permissions of how to manage the integration. Everything is in one place. Everything's backed up to Git, right? So, as you start to see more use cases, this is the path we see every customer take. You start out, you have a couple of integrations, relatively easy to manage those in house.

Then you get feature requests and bug reports, and you have to prioritize that against other work. And and again, the default integrations and a lot of these tools like HubSpot can help solve that problem, but inevitably customers are going to want something more and you need a platform to manage that complexity, right?

And that's what I always tell people is if you think about that maintenance time that you spend either, either you're not solving the customer use case and the default integration is just running on auto or you're thinking about it proactively, And trying to reduce that time for your team and use an integration platform like Pipedream to solve both the 10 percent edge cases and everything because it's very effective once you start to manage everything in one place, you get the data control you need, you get the collaboration with your whole team and the rest of the benefits of the platform.

Noah: that's awesome. And I think you brought up a really good example. It's especially as you're starting to build out more of these, it's just control and it's the ability to also scale without necessarily having to start from scratch. So what does a future roadmap of pipe Pipedream look like?

And it's, how's AI going to play a part in it?

Dylan: Yeah, AI is. It's very interesting for us. We see many more people writing code. That's a great thing for us because they're building more applications.

And I think that it changed our roadmap to some degree because now we're actually less focused on helping people write all the integration code they wanted to write and focused more on what's the rest of the business value that we're adding to you.

How can we help save your time?

It's leaning into the prebuilt integrations, definitely, because there's more than just code there. Chat GPT can tell you how to send a message to Slack or, against HupSpot it's about managing the authorization process Oh, off. Consistent headache. You've got to have some infrastructure to manage that.

We solve that for you. We're always giving you fresh credentials that you can use for any linked account. You don't have to set up any infrastructure to do that. And then the workflow builder and our execution environment, the runtime that workflows run in, we're leaning more into that and figuring out like, what in this world of AI is going to be beneficial to people trying to deploy applications faster?

Because AI solves so much of the code writing piece. And now people are like, well, now that I've got this app, how do I host it? How do I deploy, right? And AI hasn't solved that yet. I think that we're trying to lean into can AI help even simplify that? A lot of cool tools like Repl. it agent. I don't know if you saw that announcement.

Fantastic new product, trying to solve both problems, helping you write code and they host it all. Like we're thinking more about that approach. AI is big on our backlog. Just more tactically we were adding a lot more control flow primitives our build. So looping, branching, error handling, all the things that you can do in code, but on a workflow level, you want to be able to orchestrate those operations across pre built integration.

So loop over every contact in a CSV, upload it to HubSpot. And typically you might have to lean on code to do more complex operations. We're going to make that more accessible. So it also addresses your earlier question of how do we expand the use cases of the platform and the accessibility of the platform to, to non coders.

So control flow is a big part of that. We're working on the shameless plug I have about the product that I'm working on. It's called Pipedream Connect.

Noah: Sure.

Dylan: Connect is to make it easy to build, These integrations directly into your core product in the same way that you build them at Pipedream today.

So you have an integrations page that might, sync data with HubSpot, Salesforce, NetSuite, whatever. Again, today you might have to manage some of that UI yourself. It's in your core application. You want that role. Pipedream Connect is trying to take all the things we've built about the core of Pipedream product.

And then make it far easier to embed that in your product.

Noah: Interesting. So this is for the software company or the app company to essentially embed all the capabilities to make it super easy. It's like having all the prebuilt integrations right off the bat.

Dylan: that's exactly right. We see a lot of customers who will push their own customers to Zapier or Pipedream and say, We'll give you a feed of your data, but you go build the thing yourself. Because they know it's hard. It takes a lot time to build integrations. What we want to do is make it easy for, exactly, the app partner, the developer, to build those things in hours, have Pipedream maintain most of the hard logic around, again, managing auth.

The execution of the workflow and embed that directly in your product. Cause I talked about how it was, we want to see more people really building Pipedream production. People who try, they give us a lot of good feedback. They say, well, it's, I can do it, but it's a little hard because you focus so much on internal automations before, and of course I can wire it up, but I really want just maybe the Pipedream builder directly in my product, almost like a white labeled experience.

Right. Or or I want to build a prebuilt integrations. Users just link their accounts. They fill in a few fields, they save and they're ready. Right. And so we're hearing a lot more of those use cases. We want to make that simpler for people. So we're really excited

Noah: And I especially, and I don't know if it will work, but especially for a lot of legacy applications that it's a pain in the butt to work with that you may be able to come in and help extend it. And, because I see a lot of customers switching from one application to another because it's not extendable.

They can't get their out. They can't connect it with anything else. Sometimes the organization legacy app, maybe strategically, they're doing that. By error, my opinion, but a lot of them are probably doing that simply because they just have not spent the time to build the ability to connect. Sounds like Dylan, this is a fantastic application.

I hope a lot of the companies who are listening today of legacy applications out there are going to reach out to you, Dylan, say, Can we just can we leverage you guys? Because I would that was the case. Dylan, what? What suggestions you have for founders and entrepreneurs and your whole journey that you would like to share?

Dylan: One thing I talked about earlier, I think still resonates deeply with me. Most, I'm in San Francisco. Most founders here can build almost anything. That's not the hard part about building a company. And I think that it took me, I'm on my third company now, and it took me, founding, it took me. Until now to figure out that deeply understanding customer requirements, the marketing pricing, how many hundreds of hours we've had about pricing.

So hard to figure out it's those challenges that prevent companies from scaling effectively. It is often not, if you have product market fit, it's often the technology. It's the other business challenges. And I encourage a lot of technical founders to lean deeply into those problems because.

My first two companies, I absolutely didn't, and I leaned on my non technical, the CEO

Noah: build it and it will come, customers will simply come and they'll pay whatever and it'll be great.

Dylan: And it's the fantasy we all want to happen, and for the most successful products, easier for them. But most products have to put effort into that, right?

Now, there's nuance there because we focus a lot on building our own viral loops and like I mentioned the search stuff. I would encourage founders to think about how to automate marketing because that's been very effective for us, like publishing those integration pages and and the use case marketing.

It helps customers think about all the things they can do with a product. They find us more easily and we have to spend less manual time or less paid advertising doing that. So it's been a very effective low cost acquisition channel for us. That's one thing that I've loved thinking about as part of this company, but the business problems are so tough.

It's like the Technology is getting easier and easier these days to

Noah: it's the business. Well, I think you also, and hopefully listeners here, especially in your case where you're solving problems for all these different applications and software, there's obviously someone Googling maybe how do I integrate hotspot and QuickBooks, or how do I integrate hotspot and Sage, and it's a pretty simple, you know what that search is going to be, and if you provide that information, knowledge base upfront.

So if you are building an application. You guys may be a little bit unique because you're piggybacking off of all these other applications, which kudos to you to think about in advance because it's paying dividends. Now, from a search perspective, Dylan, this has been an absolutely phenomenal conversation, and I hope the listeners are really taken away.

Like what exactly is Pipedream? How does it integrate? And also take away knowing that pretty much anything you want to integrate can be integrated now. Especially with tools like Pipedream, um, Dylan, if people want to learn more about you, more about Pipedream, how do they find that information out?

Dylan: Yeah. Pipedream. com is the best place to go. We've got a lot of great docs use case information, how to solve any problem and and reach out. We've got a great public community where us founders are in there chatting with customers. So we'd love to talk to you if you have a specific problem and yeah, really looking forward to people trying the tool.

Noah: Awesome. And Dylan, I can attest that our own director of technology is in those forums and he's talked directly to you as well. But again, thank you so much for joining us and listeners thank you so much for joining us. And that really wraps up today. Again, UpYourStack is a weekly podcast that features companies

you've either built their apps on HubSpot or integrate with HubSpot to help you get the most out of your HubSpot tech stack. Again, thanks for joining us and I hope you enjoyed listening.

​