Podium provide a suite of online tools to help businesses better engage their customers. From customer reviews, to SMS communications, through to payments, Podium is used by more than 100,000 businesses globally.
As a result of their interstellar-like startup growth, they were named one of America’s fasted growing companies (13th) by Fast Company, and one of the next “billion dollar startups” by Forbes in 2018.
One of Podium’s key growth strategies has been to integrate with the third-party apps that their customers are using. These apps range from mainstream tools like Xero for accounting, through to industry-specific software.
Podium approached Custom D to help lead the charge across NZ and AUS as an official integration partner.
podium.com
Custom D is very transparent and easy to work with, and they deliver good value for the money.
Brian Rea - Senior Product BD Manager
Scalable Infrastructure
Given the scale of Podium’s plans for integrating, we needed to build scalability in from the start. We choose to use micro-services on AWS (Amazon Web Services) for code reusability, agility, and performance.
World-Class Integrations
We’ve so far developed two integrations, with ServiceM8 (job management for trades and services), and PropertyTree (property management). The work done upfront to create a scalable integration framework is already paying off, and there’s many more apps on the list.
Powerful API
Central to the integration work is a powerful API that we have created, with different endpoints mapping to the different operations required for each third party app e.g. handling payments, notifications etc. This API provides a flexible and future-proof means of connecting Podium with different partner apps.
Security and Reliability
By creating an integration template, we are able to ensure a consistent implementation across all apps. Without this forward-planning, there could be huge maintenance headaches down the track, along with issues of security and performance.