Jump to Scale: The Growth-First Integration Breakthrough

It was Sarah's perfect prospect. Her six-figure deal would have made the quarter, the customer was eager to move forward, and then... 'We need to know this works with our CRM before we can sign. And, we don't use Salesforce.' Sarah's heart sank: Three months later, the deal was dead. This scenario plays out in B2B software companies every day, with integration challenges silently killing growth.

For years, I've watched as companies pour resources into building and maintaining integrations, only to find themselves trapped in an endless cycle of technical debt and missed opportunities. At Avalara, I managed a fleet of 700 connectors (reusable integrations) while also witnessing the paradox firsthand: The very integrations driving our growth were simultaneously limiting it. So, I asked myself what it would take to break this paradox and unlock true scale?

This realization led me on a journey that included conversations with nearly 70 industry professionals and ultimately to founding Jump. Our insight was simple but profound: B2B integration has been misunderstood as a technical problem when it's actually a growth problem. And by reframing integrations as a growth problem, we can unlock unprecedented scale for SaaS companies.

The Integration Paradox

At Avalara, this paradox became painfully clear as we maintained our fleet of 700 connectors. Our data showed that customers needed an average of 3.9 integrations to fully implement our solution—a clear indication that without these integrations, we couldn't grow. Each new integration expanded our market and helped close deals faster. Yet simultaneously, our largest engineering team was consumed with maintaining these integrations rather than building new ones or enhancing our core product.

This tension creates a vicious cycle: As companies grow, they add more integrations to support that growth. Each new integration requires ongoing maintenance, pulling resources away from innovation. The technical debt accumulates, slowing the pace of new integration development precisely when market demands accelerate. Eventually, companies hit a wall where their integration capacity becomes the bottleneck for their entire growth strategy.

The integration paradox manifests in three distinct but interconnected challenges:

The Product Paradox: More integrations mean more customers, but more integrations also mean more complexity, maintenance burden, and less capacity to innovate.
The Organizational Paradox: Integrations are often the most requested feature from sales and partners, yet they're typically the lowest priority for engineering and product teams focused on differentiated value.
The Economic Paradox: Integrations deliver the best unit economics of any growth channel, yet most companies can't accurately forecast their ROI because the costs are hidden across multiple departments.

This led me to ask a deceptively simple question that would prove transformative: Why integrate at all?

Why Integrate?

After witnessing integration challenges across multiple organizations, I decided to approach the problem differently. During my time as a fractional CMO for seed-stage startups, I saw firsthand how partnerships and integrations could drive explosive distribution—and how technical limitations frequently derailed these opportunities. If integrations were such a burden, why were companies investing so heavily in them? What was the fundamental business driver?

To answer this, I spoke with nearly 70 professionals across sales, partnerships, product, engineering, and finance, asking them one simple question: "Why does your company invest in integrations?"

What emerged was a revelation: Not all integrations serve the same purpose. In fact, there are three distinct categories of integrations, each with different stakeholders, different success metrics, and different economic justifications.

The Three Types of SaaS Integrations:

Product Integrations

These are features powered by a partner's API that form part of your core value proposition. The crucial distinction: they're available to all your users. Consider a fintech platform that uses KYC (Know Your Customer) verification from a specialized provider. Every user needs this capability, making it a core product feature that your engineering and product teams should own.

Efficiency Integrations

These connect your internal systems to make your workforce more productive. They're invisible to customers but critical for operations. At Bloomberg Industry Group, I saw how efficiency integrations between content management systems and customer-facing applications streamlined operations and reduced time-to-market for new features.

Growth Integrations

These are third-party integrations connecting your platform to tools your customers or prospects already use. Unlike product integrations, these aren't used by everyone—they might only be needed by one customer or a segment. But they're crucial for driving efficient distribution and closing deals. When working with a B2B SaaS startup in the marketing space, we saw conversion rates double for prospects who could integrate with their existing marketing automation platform—but we could only support three of the dozens available.

This framework clarified something profound: The big unsolved problem is Growth integrations. While the industry has somewhat addressed Product and Efficiency integrations, Growth integrations remain a stubborn challenge because they:

Must be customizable for each customer's unique needs
Require constant maintenance as third-party APIs change
Don't benefit from economies of scale (each one serves a small customer segment)
Are typically lower priority than core product features

Most importantly, I realized existing approaches were fundamentally solving the wrong problem. Integration platforms and custom development efforts focus on the technical aspects of building the integration. But for Growth integrations, building was never the hard part. The hard part was understanding:

Who to build this for (stakeholders)
What they need (requirements)
What is possible (discovery and dependencies)
Why it matters (business outcomes)

The business impact of this misalignment is staggering. As one CFO told me, "If your integrations increase sales win rate, that moves every other growth needle in business.”

Understanding that B2B software companies primarily integrate to drive growth changes everything. It shifts our focus from solving a technical problem to enabling business outcomes—and that's where AI creates unprecedented opportunity.

Third-Party Integrations: The Growth Accelerator

When looking at the three types of integrations, it became clear that third-party Growth integrations present both the greatest opportunity and the greatest challenge for B2B software companies. Let me explain why they matter so much and why traditional approaches fall short.

Why Third-Party Integrations Drive Growth

The data tells a compelling story. In my research across dozens of B2B software companies, I found that businesses with robust integration programs consistently outperform their peers:

Companies with strong third-party integration capabilities see 50% higher win rates in competitive deals
Partnership-driven growth through integrations typically delivers 40% or more increase in top-of-funnel leads—with the best unit economics of any acquisition channel
Customers with active integrations have 25-40% more recognized revenue due to faster onboarding and activation

These aren't just statistics—they represent real business impact. One Series A founder told me, "When we launched our HubSpot integration, inbound demo requests tripled." A CRO at a Series B company shared, "When prospects hear we integrate with their tech stack, sales cycles shorten by weeks."

The Current Landscape: Why Existing Approaches Fall Short

Today, software companies use two primary strategies to deliver third-party integrations, and both have significant limitations:

Custom Software Development

Many companies build integrations as custom software with in-house teams or consultants. This approach fails for several reasons:

Talent Misalignment: A-players don't want to work on repetitive integration code—they want to build innovative core features
Culture Challenges: Engineering teams become frustrated by constant context-switching between strategic product work and tactical integration fixes
Scalability Ceiling: There's no power-law improvement in capacity—adding more engineers yields diminishing returns
Maintenance Burden: Custom integrations create a growing mountain of technical debt that compounds over time

Integration Platforms

Others turn to iPaaS (Integration Platform as a Service) solutions, which come with their own limitations:

Capability Constraints: Pre-built connectors only work for standard use cases, but real business requirements rarely fit neatly into these templates
Hidden Costs: What seems affordable initially becomes expensive as you scale or need custom functionality
Technical Lock-in: Once you've committed to a platform, migrating away becomes prohibitively complex

Both approaches fundamentally miss the mark because they're solving the wrong problem. They focus on the mechanics of building the integration—the code, the data mapping, the deployment. But that's never been the hard part.

The Real Problem: Understanding Before Building

The critical insight that drove the founding of Jump is that integration challenges stem from a lack of understanding upstream of the build process. The questions that stall integration projects aren't technical—they're contextual:

Who are all the stakeholders that need to be involved?
What are the specific business requirements that will drive value?
What's actually possible given the constraints of the systems being integrated?
How will this integration impact revenue, retention, and growth metrics?

This is why AI presents such a remarkable opportunity. The revolution in AI isn't just about automating code—it's about enabling a better understanding of complex business contexts. By focusing on the business outcomes and the people who care most about solving growth challenges, we're able to approach the integration problem from an entirely different angle.

The future of B2B software requires a new approach to integration—one that is designed from the ground up for business users rather than developers, and focused on growth outcomes rather than technical implementations.

That's exactly what we're building at Jump.

The AI Unlock: A First Principles Rethinking

I started by asking, "What must be true for custom integrations on-demand, at infinite scale to be possible?"

This question led me to reconsider the entire integration challenge from first principles. Traditional approaches have accepted certain constraints as immutable: integration development must be labor-intensive, maintenance-heavy, and ultimately limited by human capacity. But is this actually true?

The fundamental shift in my thinking came from recognizing that integrations are, at their core, just software. And while software development has established best practices that improve quality and reduce maintenance burden, these practices rarely make it into integration development workflows. Why? Because integrations are typically treated as second-class citizens in the development process.

The key insight: What if we applied the gold standard of software development—a healthy Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC)—specifically to integrations? A healthy SDLC includes clear requirements gathering, proper documentation, comprehensive testing, version control, continuous integration, and systematic monitoring. These practices aren't revolutionary, but they're consistently overlooked in integration development for one simple reason: integrations are always lower priority than differentiated value.

However, the emergence of AI fundamentally changes this equation. AI doesn't just automate coding tasks—it transforms how we approach the entire integration lifecycle:

Requirements Gathering: AI can extract, clarify, and document business requirements from conversations with stakeholders, bridging the gap between business users and technical implementation
System Discovery: AI can analyze API documentation, data models, and existing implementations to rapidly understand what's possible within the constraints of the systems being integrated
Implementation: AI can generate maintainable, well-documented code that follows best practices by default, dramatically reducing the maintenance burden
Testing and Validation: AI can create comprehensive test suites that verify functionality across edge cases, ensuring integrations work reliably
Monitoring and Maintenance: AI can detect and diagnose integration failures before they impact customers, and automatically adapt to API changes

The insight was clear: The problem wasn't that integrations are inherently difficult to scale—it's that we've been approaching them with the wrong tools and processes.

This realization led to another critical insight: AI will make building software dramatically easier, leading to an explosion in the number of B2B software offerings. Without solving the integration challenge, these new entrants won't be able to compete effectively with incumbents. But what if native, third-party integrations were as easy to create as building software with AI? This could transform the entire B2B software ecosystem, enabling a new wave of innovation and competition.

By combining AI's capabilities with a first-principles approach to integration development, we can break free from the capacity constraints that have limited integration programs. This isn't just an incremental improvement—it's a paradigm shift that makes custom integrations on-demand, at infinite scale not just possible, but inevitable.

Introducing a New Path Forward: Jumpers

The integration landscape has been dominated by two traditional approaches, both with significant limitations:

Custom Integrations

These are built either by your in-house engineering team or outsourced to consultants or agencies. Custom integrations offer:

Complete flexibility to match your exact requirements
The ability to integrate with any system, not just popular ones
Full control over the integration's functionality and behavior

But they come with critical drawbacks:

High development costs (typically $20,000-$100,000 per integration)
Months of development time
Ongoing maintenance burden as APIs change
Engineering resources diverted from core product innovation
Limited scalability - each new integration requires similar effort

Connectors

These are pre-built integration templates offered by unified API providers or iPaaS (Integration Platform as a Service) vendors. Connectors provide:

Faster time to market
Lower initial cost
Built-in maintenance

Their limitations, however, are substantial:

Only available for the most popular systems
Limited to standardized functionality that works for "most" customers
Minimal customization options for your unique requirements
"Off-the-shelf" approach that can't address specialized customer needs
Hidden costs as you scale or need custom functionality

The Jumper Approach

At Jump, we're pioneering a fundamentally different approach with Jumpers—a new category of integration that combines the strengths of both approaches while eliminating their weaknesses. Jumpers represent a fundamentally different category, combining the strengths of both approaches while eliminating their weaknesses.

Fully Customizable: Like custom integrations, Jumpers can be tailored to your exact business requirements and can work with any system, not just popular ones
Scalable by Design: Unlike custom integrations, Jumpers don't create an ever-growing maintenance burden as you add more of them
Business-User Focused: Rather than requiring developer involvement, Jumpers are designed for revenue teams, partnerships, and business stakeholders
Outcome Oriented: Instead of focusing on technical specifications, Jumpers start with the business outcomes you're trying to achieve

The key difference is that Jumpers aren't limited by either the rigidity of pre-built templates or the capacity constraints of engineering teams. They provide the customization you need without the traditional trade-offs in time, cost, or scale.

Why This Matters

For Series A companies pushing toward Series B, choosing the right integration approach isn't just a technical decision—it's a strategic one that sets the future trajectory of your company.

With custom integrations, you might build 1-2 high-value integrations per quarter, forcing you to say "no" to numerous sales opportunities
With connectors, you might cover 5-10 popular systems but still lose deals when prospects use niche tools or need customization
With Jumpers, you can deliver exactly what your customers need, when they need it, without compromising

With Jump, you can now close more business, knowing you can deliver the integrations needed to for your customers and partner.