Extending the power of ActiveCampaign through third-party apps and empowering developers
About ActiveCampaign
ActiveCampaign is a leading customer experience automation platform focused on empowering small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) to automate repetitive marketing tasks, enabling marketers to focus on creativity and strategy.
Problem & Goal
Historically, ActiveCampaign marketers relied on third-party integrators like Zapier to connect the various tools in their marketing tech stack. While functional, these integrators created several challenges:
1. Lack of Visibility: ActiveCampaign can't monitor or optimize data flow through these 'dumb pipes.'
2. Data Limitations: 'Dumb' data isn't dynamic or actionable within ActiveCampaign.
3. Missed Opportunities: Automations can't fully utilize or understand 'dumb' data.
Goal: Create a fully-featured app 'ecosystem' that enhances the power and seamless integration of apps within a marketer's workflow. At the same time, provide tools for third-party developers to take full advantage of this new power when building apps. This boils down to two distinct goals:
1. Enable marketers to seamlessly connect, configure, and use apps.
2. Provide developers with tools to build, test, and publish apps efficiently.
“How can we extend the capabilities of ActiveCampaign to provide apps that enhance our marketers’ workflows while being developer-friendly?”
This project requires a two-pronged approach working together in unison.
One prong will be a suite of developer specific tools that will allow third-party developers to quickly and easily build, test, and publish apps on the ActiveCampaign platform with minimal assistance from ActiveCampaign. By providing a flexible, robust, and componentized way to build apps, we can help the App Ecosystem grow exponentially without always directly building apps ourselves.
The other prong will be a simple and efficient way to connect and configure apps for marketers. Apps are worth nothing if they aren’t useful and usable. We need to ensure that incoming and outgoing data is dynamic and easily understood. App data must be usable in automations for both triggers and actions. App data must also be usable in custom objects.
The Project Briefs
This two-pronged approach comprised two main projects, each with several sub-projects:
1. App Studio: A developer toolkit designed to help third-party developers build, test, release, and manage apps on the ActiveCampaign platform.
2. App Experience: A marketer-focused interface for connecting and managing apps, mapping data flows, leveraging apps in automations, and viewing app data as custom objects.
Detailed breakdowns of each project are outlined below:
Additional Information
ActiveCampaign API Documentation - If you really want to get into the weeds on how all this works