Zoom Marketplace — what we have learnt

When we started this journey about a year and half ago, we set out to tackle two different dimensions of our business: building/expanding a platform on our own and connecting with other platforms and services. While these two dimensions needed a different strategies all the way from engineering architecture to value creation to developer acquisition, the common converging point is the need to have a Marketplace. This has been an exciting journey so far but with ups and downs. While we are still crawling, it’s been about five months since we have launched it and so it’s time to look back and share our learning. We have 36 published apps in our marketplace, 100k+ users using these apps and more than 2000 private apps built so far. This is a multi part blog with follow on posts from Zoom developer relations team.

The decision to develop a marketplace at Zoom was driven completely by the needs of our customers. As Zoom grew into a viable player in the collaboration/meeting space, a number of our customers were asking for connectivity into other platforms and services to get end to end solutions. While we have built many of the common connectors ourselves, we quickly realized that this is not a scalable model. A strong foundational ecosystem is extremely important for a company to survive and grow in the long run. We have also realized that a number of our partners, customers and third/fourth party developers have been consuming our APIs/SDKs in large scale, building some of these connectivity themselves but they do not have a place to publish it for the rest of Zoom customers to discover them.

Focus on developing solid framework early on that adapts itself to accommodate the workflows and business processes around the marketplace.

The foundational framework needed a number of different things to come together: While the tech stack and the overall engineering architecture is important (you will quickly get into a scaling problem if you are not careful with the architecture) equally important aspects are clear workflows around the framework (developer flow, publisher flow, approval flow etc.), the business/validation process, updating EULA and creating developer specific legal agreements.

It’s not about the numbers but the value and security

What really mattered to us from the early days is to make sure that every app that gets published in our marketplace creates some value to at least a subset of our customers and the customers can trust these apps to a large degree. We knew from day one that we are looking at larger enterprise customers consuming these apps in marketplace and so a rigorous process around security focused testing and validation is critical. Securing third party apps and connectors on the platform is an ongoing exercise — making sure that the basics (as simple as no customer or end user data can be pulled by apps without their explicit consent and approval and to make sure that they are removed when they remove the app) is essential.

Developer documentation and forums — two very critical elements of a platform

We had to spend quite a bit of time in identifying/evaluating right set of tools to host our documentation, developer forums and connecting all them to our framework/workflow. We had to move our docs few times from hosting it ourselves with wordpress to moving to a provider where we identified significant latency issues accessing the docs from other countries to finally finding the right hosting framework. Same happens with forum. Each of these takes time as we ended up refactoring our docs as we moved them across hosting frameworks.

We had some great feedback on improving our docs — establishing a clear developer doc structure is essential and we could have done a better job at it early on. Poor and incorrect documentation on the API semantics, interfaces, and ambiguous terminology results in more support calls and frustration that builds up. It’s a good investment to spend the time and resources on it early on the cycle.

Create a consistent process for App validations

We have created a single process and workflow for approving the apps — whether the app is developed internally at Zoom or by third parties — the process and validation criterias are the same. This created some frictions early on but once everyone understands the value for consistency, it works out well.

Clear sample apps, case studies, libraries and versioning

This is a area of improvement for us and we are working hard on getting some of this done. Some of it needs significant resource commitments and making sure that this is a business priority for the company is critical. We have the demo apps in our Github and have started to build vertical case studies. We could have thought through API versioning early on in the platform development cycle and could have done a better job. Introducing versioning scheme after the fact involves significant refactoring and I would advice to make this investment up front and do it right. Same holds true for developing language specific libraries (start with node.js) to abstract the complexities of using the APIs and authentication. These are all the areas that we have focused on now and for the next several months.

Data, Data and Data

I can’t emphasize enough how critical it is to build the data models and dashboards so track the KPIs to track how the marketplace/platform performs — both for developers and for end users. Without solid data to track, you will not be able to make business decisions on where to focus on. We had this problem with our SDKs in the past — the data is available but it needs to be extracted, analyzed and visualized in real time and on demand. Not running SQL queries and export to Excel. The developer relations team needs to have this data in fingertips.

Commitment

Beyond all of this, creating a platform and a marketplace around it needs multi year business commitment and not to expect the results overnight. At Zoom, we are committed to foster the ecosystem for our developers who rely on us and our customers and end users who trust that we add value to them in every step.

Authors note: This was written back in July 2019 … Zoom marketplace is now a popular platform with 800+ apps. I’m no longer with Zoom.