Once upon a time, Arnie stood over me at the airport trying to figure out why I was telling partners not to expect the same levels of integration in ConnectWise as we do in Autotask. We were at a conference a year later and he said:
“You know how you can tell that Vlad is pissed at you? He blogs about it.”
Well, things change. Thankfully, sometimes things change for better.
Back in the long, long ago there was no API. There was an existing integration between CW and some other SPAM tool and then there was tcpdump. I remember quite vividly how our initial integration between ExchangeDefender and CW worked – mostly because I wrote it. Everything was hardcoded so we sniffed the URL it was hardcoded to fetch, we reverse engineered the data stream. If that wasn’t dirty enough, we also had to hack the hosts file to mask ExchangeDefender servers as something else and I also had to distribute a wget binary I compiled myself to ignore SSL certificate mismatch. All this to get you a number on an executive report nobody ever looked at.
To say that I was pissed off about getting constantly reamed out in public feedback about our integration would be putting it politely. I was in my 20’s and stupid ambitious so whenever I could get a breather from stuff like this I put towards building Shockey Monkey. It’s tough to focus on building something when you’ve got people beating you over the head. If my professional experience has taught me anything it’s this:
Don’t get in a way of ambitious a$$holes who have their money on the line.
That first integration was many years ago.
Not my favorite memory.
But as I’ve highlighted above, we all face problems from time to time. I talk to tons of partners all day every day and this stuff isn’t easy. There are people that skate by and only do what they need to in order to get to the next level. Then there are folks that care and get to every detail. If you’ve played Mario Brothers a million times you probably know exactly where to jump, where to duck and how to get to the end in the fastest way possible. Then there are those of us that know where the brick block is and how to hit it for some extra points and coins.
Last week we published v4 of our CW integration, built on top of the new Web APIs, supporting the type of stuff our partners have been demanding for years. The difference between the new API and my original experience is night and day. The new integration doesn’t rely on the email connector to trigger events – it uses callback functions. It doesn’t require complex status switching, template parsing and customization or other tricks – it just requires a URL. It doesn’t come with a 32 page setup guide either.
The new integration piping isn’t just good – it’s phenomenal.
Great companies have a long term plan and even though they may be dealing with a mess from time to time, they don’t forget what they are building and who they are building it for. As I looked at a sea of venture capital backed vendors funded by folks who are pissed they didn’t put it into Facebook and the army of IT shops who are constantly battling how to grow faster and find the right talent.. I hope you keep this in mind: There are no quick fixes.
Getting something great takes time and effort, one you’ve already got and the other you just need to commit to.
I talk to folks all the time that think they are just one tweak away from being in the clear. Listen, if it were that easy you already would have done it and we wouldn’t be having this conversation. If you’re constantly complaining about having to replace your service manager because things are getting dropped it might not be as simple as just replacing one person. It may in fact start with you.
Draw up what you need to do to go from where you are now to where you need to be. Ask your clients, they are probably all too happy to tell you just how much you suck. Pitch potential solutions or ways of working around problems or minimizing them. Then – and most importantly – get to work. We’ve all got brilliant ideas and it’s all too easy to criticize others. It’s quite another to turn those ideas into solutions and problems.
One thing I can share that works for me – so long as you continue to work on your problems you’ll never be beat. It’s as true for APIs as it is for everything else.
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