About

Why appmarketplace.com exists

“Where’s the data?” A question I'd ask thousands of times over the next decade.

It was Monday 25th June 2012, and it was my first day as the second member of the EMEA Marketing API Partnerships team at Facebook. Edward, the first member of the team, had spent the previous six months spinning up a partnerships function as a side project, alongside his sales account management role.

Edward had done an awesome job. “Typical partnerships” I thought.

Typical because partnerships are perenially under-invested. Not enough people, not enough time. The tools are rarely fit for purpose. Data is in short supply. Partnerships teams wear many, many hats.

Edward and I were “dividing up” hundreds of Marketing API partners between us. 120 countries, dozens of languages. "Where's the data?" We didn't have reliable data. So we licked the tips of our proverbial fingers, stuck them in the air, and mapped it all out on a whiteboard. And got back to building a multi-billion dollar Ads API partner ecosystem.

Salesforce, a partner supporting over $100 million of ad spend, was one of the partners divided up that way that day.

I managed Facebook’s relationship with them. And Experian. And Wix. Edward and I each managed dozens more.

If you work in partnerships, this probably sounds all too familiar.

It felt familiar when I joined Intercom in 2015. They hired me to help them “launch a developer platform.”

More “where’s the data” questions. With familiar reply to each of them (delivered as Slack DMs): 🤔

How many partner-built integrations do we have?

Which other platforms and marketplaces do our partners work with?

Which app marketplaces are our own integrations listed in?

Are our integrations any good? Do customers like them?

How do our integrations compare with our competitors? Better? Worse?

Which integrations are we planning to build next? Why?

How does our ecosystem compare with our closest competitor, Zendesk?

Should we launch our own app marketplace? What does success look like?

Who are the best partner contacts to connect with? And prospects?

It fell on Intercom’s platform product/partnerships team - me - to find answers to these questions. All while product and partner managing a gazillion features and relationships. “Typical partnerships” I thought.

My “where’s the data” questions were well defined by the time Scott Brinker hired me to help lay the foundation of what became the HubSpot App Partner Program, in 2018. It was a career highlight.

At HubSpot, data was easier to come by.

But it was mostly sales and marketing data. We needed different data and insight to understand how our ecosystem compared with our competitors and platform peers.

Our App Marketplace would put us on the same platform path as Shopify, Atlassian, and Salesforce. A well defined App Partner program would smooth that path. A “well defined” program required research, benchmarking, and lots of partner outreach. And partnership data we couldn't get hold of.

We launched the HubSpot App Marketplace and App Partner program at INBOUND 19. It was, by all accounts, a success. From 150 partners in 2018, we scaled the program to hundreds of partners and 1,200 App Marketplace listings by the time I left HubSpot almost four years later.

Throughout my decade-long partnership journey - at Facebook, Intercom, and HubSpot - I hoped and believed someone would build better tools and offer comprehensive, relevant data for SaaS partnership leaders.

To help them discover and research new partnerships, faster. To breeze through listing and certification processes, effortlessly. To help partnership leaders benchmark their activities and impact with competitors and peers.

To give them the data and insights they need to advocate for more resources, grow their teams, and scale their impact. To help their companies acquire more customers at a super-low CAC. The Holy Grail of B2B SaaS.

Over time, my hope and belief ran out. Nobody built better tools, or offered the data and insight I hoped would exist.

So I started creating them myself.

appmarketplace.com exists to give partnership leaders the tools, data, insight, and support I hoped and believed would exist one day. I'm on a mission to make app marketplaces your best performing channel.

I’m grateful for your support, and I'm excited to guide you on your app marketplace journey.