Why you need to add webhooks to your PLG playbook

Product led growth is all the rage and everyone is looking for the next idea to accelerate product adoption. One easy way to bolster your PLG efforts is webhooks. Here are 5 reasons why you need to have webhooks as part of your PLG strategy:

1. Workflow Automation & No Code

No code integrators like Zapier and Make enable no code automations for thousands of apps. They can even integrate with services that do not have an app on their platforms via webhooks.

Once you've set up webhooks, building a Zapier app is fairly simple. At Svix we even have a one click Zapier integration builder that exports your webhook event types to create a Zapier app!

2. Increase Usage

When you can automate customer workflows with webhooks, it makes your users' lives easier. It frees them up to do more and get more value out of your product.

For example, SendGrid webhooks help send emails in response to specific actions an end user may take. By automating this with webhooks, instead of having to run reports or get notifications to send follow up emails manually, email marketers can instead design their next campaign.

When you increase core usage, you create more power users who benefit from features in your premium plans. Using the SendGrid example, when people send more emails, they’ll want to validate emails to make sure they’re sending to real email addresses. They’ll also want dedicated IPs to ensure deliverability. These are both features of their premium plans.

3. Integrations

Every SaaS sales person has been asked the question “what integrations do you have” or “do you integrate with X” at some point. What if your sales reps could answer with “we integrate with anyone that can send an HTTP request”?

Instead of building bespoke integrations for each integration partner, with webhooks you make it simple to build integrations. If you're thinking about launching an app marketplace a la Hubspot or Shopify, webhooks are going to be essential:

https://developers.hubspot.com/docs/api/webhooks
https://shopify.dev/docs/apps/webhooks

4. Reduce Churn

As usage increases and your product becomes a critical component of your customers' workflows via integrations, your product is more useful and drives more value. It also increases switching costs because it's another thing that will need to be managed in the event of a transition to a new product. More value + higher switching costs => stickier customers.

5. Competition

Many services like Stripe and Slack have very popular webhook features. The popularity of these services have brought webhooks to the forefront where customers now expect to be able to automate and integrate via webhooks. It's possible your competitors already offer webhook notifications and if they don't, what an opportunity to make your product stand out!

Conclusion

Webhooks provide a ton of value to users of SaaS products and they're starting to become table stakes/requirements for SaaS consumers when making purchasing decisions. For vendors, the value has always been obvious but building out a reliable, scalable, and secure solution was a tall order. With Svix, you can build a world class webhook service in a matter of minutes to start integrating with thousands of applications and drive growth for your business.