Show HN: Paragon Connect (YC W20) – Plaid for SaaS Apps
To share a little backstory, we started with a slightly different product (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22813834) and decided to build Paragon Connect after hearing so many customer requests for this specific use case.
If you’re a B2B software company, your customers have probably asked “does your product integrate with Salesforce / Slack / HubSpot / Jira / QuickBooks / etc.?” But building integrations in-house is a big lift - learning the differences between each vendor’s API and authentication methods, managing user tokens, and building the UI for users to manage their integrations can take months of engineering.
Companies we talked to consistently shared this pain point with us, so we wanted to try creating a 'Plaid-like' experience for embedding 3rd-party SaaS integrations into your product.
You can add Paragon's SDK with a few lines of code, then 'switch on' integration with any of our supported app providers. We provide a pre-built UI portal for your end users to activate and configure their integrations, and managed authentication so you don't need to handle the different auth strategies for each provider.
Once you've setup our SDK, you can use Paragon's drag-and-drop workflow builder to map data between your app and other SaaS apps, or you can use Paragon's REST API to access the app provider's API directly.
To show how it works, here's a quick demo video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BcwOUMRXg_k&t=5s) where we build a Slack integration with Paragon Connect in about 8 minutes.
If you're interested in trying Paragon Connect, you can sign up for a free 14-day trial here: https://dashboard.useparagon.com/signup. We'd love to hear your feedback - thanks for reading this far, and looking forward to your thoughts in the comments!