Whalesync builds connectors for their data-sync platform

Goals

• Start building deep integrations with Airtable, Salesforce and Webflow & expand to dozens more
• Cut down time to ship new integrations from 3 months to 1-2 weeks
• Find an integration partner they can build on top of connectors/infrastructure

Highlight

Whalesync’s team was able to create a Webflow connector from scratch using Connector Builder in just a few days vs their old process that lasted 3 months.

Company Overview

Founded: 2021
Industry: Data Sync
Number of employees: 10
Location: Remote/US

Description

• Whalesync is a Y Combinator & VC-backed company that enables businesses to automatically sync their data across mission-critical tools like HubSpot, Salesforce, Airtable, Notion, Postgres, and more.
• The product makes it easy to manage customer data, marketing campaigns, and blog content across SaaS applications without needing to hire software engineers or build custom data pipelines.
• Whalesync has brought a fresh approach to data sync that goes beyond Zapier’s simple if/then automations. Their product offers capabilities for both deeper integration and faster implementation of two-way automations. Despite being a young company, established businesses like Descript (which has raised $100M) are using Whalesync to enhance their automation and go-to-market efforts.

Problem

When Whalesync started out in 2021, they knew they would need a robust system for building deep connectors, as these are a core part of their functionality.

Their in-house process of building a new connector would take 3-3.5 months on average, which was both painful and expensive. The reason it took so long is that Whalesync needed to return all the data and metadata from each app they connected to.

This prompted them to consider using a third-party solution, which triggered extensive market research and evaluation of providers ranging from ETLs (e.g., Singer) to Unified APIs (e.g., Merge) to open-source tools (e.g., Nango). They didn’t think anyone else could help them with this problem, as all the integration platforms were too shallow—until they learned about Membrane (formerly Integration App).

Why Membrane

The main criteria for a successful evaluation were:

• Flexibility of the platform: it needed to fit their existing in-house framework
• Supports bi-directional sync & real-time webhooks
• Extensive support of tables & fields for each API (e.g., get Notion page contents, not just databases)
• Ability to build on top of a framework and modify existing connectors
• Reliability: how stable is the provider, and how fast can they adapt to changes in APIs
• Speed of adding new integrations without compromising on depth

Using Membrane, they were able to fulfill all their technical requirements, which none of the other providers could match.

Additionally, their product and engineering team needed a fast-support partner, which ultimately tipped the balance in our favor.

Implementation with Membrane

Whalesync’s implementation was a combination of using our APIs and building generic logic for connectors, ultimately exposing connectors and allowing their users to build the syncs between the two apps they needed. Some of the functionalities they used:

• Getting a list of data collections from each application.

• Getting data schema for each collection.

• Real-time notifications about data changes in external applications.

Connector Builder

Whalesync had to create a new Connector that wasn’t built by us from scratch. They built a Webflow connector on their own with full functionality in just a few days.

Starting from defining how Authentication works, to specific data collections they needed using a mix-match of our configuration UI and implementation code.

One of the Whalesync engineers, Lucio highlights a few key aspects about their experience with Connector Builder:

“Importing API documentation automatically, testing tools and ease when using API calls are the biggest 3 factors that save you tons of time.”

“When you are coding a connector, using API calls is way faster than with normal methods, the testing interface is also quite helpful and faster than testing it manually. You can literally plug in a connection and from there using the testing tools is really helpful”, mentioned Lucio.

There are lots of new features upcoming in Connector Builder, including AI suggestions for data mappings and improved functionality for extracting documentation using LLMs. We’re excited to find out how Whalesync and many more customers will be using it in the near term.

What are the benefits for Whalesync?

Whalesync users can now enjoy more connectivity with a click of a button and start building syncs between more apps than before.

Given building connectors is an important facet of their platform, Whalesync is now free to focus on their unique functionality (how data is transformed and synced between applications) rather than on building connectors slowly and tediously.

What’s next?

Whalesync is planning to release 20 new high-quality connectors this year (e.g. Outreach, Stripe, Zoho and more) with Membrane.

As the AI capabilities of the connector builder improve, they plan to scale this to hundreds of connectors using Membrane.

Feel free to check out Whalesync, if you want to learn more and see how their integrations look in production.