For those of you who are new around here, welcome! And for those of you who have been using hotglue for a while, thanks for being here. The hotglue team wants to wish you a great start to 2024, and we hope to continue making your integration development easier day by day. That being said, let’s hop right in with a new 2024 hotglue product walkthrough.
What is hotglue?
Integration challenges continue to slow down developers, but we want 2024 to be the year where that doesn’t happen anymore. hotglue is an embedded cloud-based data integration tool that helps developers and engineering teams get customer data in and out of their B2B SaaS product. Why choose to build integration libraries where you add one new integration every quarter, when you can use hotglue to build integrations in days without months of development and an eternity of maintenance?
Why hotglue?
hotglue is an easy to use tool for developers that makes the process of building user-facing SaaS integrations a lot faster.
For example, imagine you’re building your SaaS product, and users are asking for different kinds of integrations left and right. In this case, hotglue would handle integrations end-to-end, so that your engineering teams don't have to waste bandwidth on frustrating integrations. Not only would hotglue take care of authentication, but also offers unifications of raw data across categories of APIs. We’ll make sure to send your data wherever you need it, and sync your data whenever you need it.
A flexible system that will make your life (and your developer’s life) easier
With hotglue, you have control over every aspect of your integration, whether it be the integration itself, or any of the preprocessing you choose to enact through hotglue. Even more so, you can always enable your own custom connectors on hotglue by building any integration against the open-source Singer Spec, as hotglue is compatible with all Singer connectors!
Why companies are choosing hotglue in 2024
hotglue offers over 200 pre-built connectors with platforms like Quickbooks, WooCommerce, and Salesforce. With just two lines of code, you can embed the hotglue widget directly into your app and have customers start linking integrations today. This provides you with a simplified self-serve portal for your users to securely connect any data source, without having to worry about tokens, sessions, and other authentication headaches.
Handling Unique APIs
One major feature that sets hotglue apart is its data transformation capabilities. You can integrate non-standard SaaS APIs, and process the data withhotglue’s Python-based layer for cleaning, shaping, and mapping data before syncing data to your systems.
Now that you have a solid understanding of the product, let me walk you through some key concepts that will get you up and running with using hotglue.
Develop and test with environments
Environments are the most macro piece of hotglue, so we won’t get down into the gritty details of it since it’s pretty self explanatory. But essentially, environments are a designated space that allows you to start testing, explore hotglue functionalities, and begin the development of your integrations with dev, staging, and production environments. We even offer the ability for you to choose where your environment is hosted, allowing you to support customers who care about data locality.
Master your integrations with flows
Once you’ve created your environment, you’re good to move onto the next step - creating your first flow. In hotglue, you can enable as many connectors as you like in a flow. Usually, engineering teams using hotglue like to group integrations into different flows (an accounting integration flow, a CRM flow, etc). For example, you might want your users to easily import data from payment tools like Stripe, or even an e-commerce platform like WooCommerce. A flow would let you easily organize what types of integrations your product supports, whether it be payment platforms, e-commerce, CRM, or more.
Seamlessly sync data with connectors
A connector****is an integration that you offer to your customers, such as Salesforce, HubSpot, and QuickBooks. Offering these connectors allows your customers to consistently read and write data to and from these systems.
Manage your live integrations with tenants
At its core, a tenant in hotglue is pretty simple. It represents one of your customers that has connected at least one of the aforementioned connectors through hotglue (each tenant, or customer of yours that connects an integration, can have as many integrations connected as they like, but remain one tenant regardless). Now when it comes to “active tenants”, that means one of your customers has initiated at least one sync of data within the last month.
Sync and manage data with jobs
Now that you have your flows and tenants set up, you can use hotglue to create jobs, which is what we call it every time you move data between your product, and the connectors your tenants link. Through these jobs, hotglue can either sync your data incrementally or historically, based on the needs of your use case.
With hotglue, you’re able to monitor job progress for all your tenants through a variety of tools such as Slack and email notifications, real-time status updates via webhooks, and real-time job logs that your team can access to debug any issues. This kind of visibility allows you to always stay on top of your integrations and be notified of any immediate issues when they occur.
Get Started Today
If you’re ready to get rid of integration blocks and put new integrations in production today, you should try out hotglue now! hotglue handles end-to-end, from authorization to processing to monitoring. Book a demo here to learn more: https://hotglue.com/demo.
