Copy.ai: Driving product usage and revenue growth through integrations

About Copy.ai

Copy.ai is a GTM AI platform designed to scale enterprise go-to-market teams by automating hundreds of tasks within the sales & marketing workflow. Their mission is to empower businesses to leverage AI throughout the organization, with hundreds of customers including Datadog, Thermo Fisher, Siemens, Black & Decker, and more. We sat down with their CTO and co-founder, Chris Lu, to learn about their integration strategy and experience with Paragon.

The problem

The lack of integrations created a disjointed experience

Customers were leveraging Copy.ai’s generative AI capabilities and sophisticated workflows to generate ads, emails, and content at scale.

While the productivity and quality of the outputs were incredible, the experience of using Copy.ai was completely disjointed from the rest of the marketing and sales teams’ workflows.

They knew they needed to bring the power of Copy.ai into the platforms where their customers host and distribute the very content that Copy.ai creates, which made it clear that they needed to provide integrations with sales and marketing tools like Salesforce and HubSpot.

"Our customers were asking for ways to integrate into their existing tools such as Salesforce, HubSpot, and many, many more, we had to find an integration provider." - Chris Lu, CTO of Copy.ai

However, building these integrations would’ve taken more than six months and hiring multiple engineers - time that they didn’t have given how fast they were growing.

"We knew we didn't want to specialize in building integration. So we wanted to find a partner who could really help us get to market a lot faster.”

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The Search for a Solution

Choosing a platform versus building in-house

The engineering team at Copy.ai deliberately chose not to build in-house - they knew how difficult it would be just to manage the authentication flow for all their users’ 3rd party apps. Not only that, some teammates had faced many challenges using legacy tools like MuleSoft, so Copy.ai knew they needed a more robust solution if they wanted to scale.

Evaluating integration platforms

The team evaluated multiple integration platforms, including Workato Embedded, n8n Embed, Make OEM and many more. However, none of these solutions enabled them to provide the end-user experience that they needed.

“A lot of the other platforms that we looked at required you to embed their services and their UI into your app, but we wanted one where we could really control the experience for our customers, yet scale them with the same power as if we built these integrations ourselves natively. Ultimately, Paragon was the one that fit all of our needs.”

As a product used by enterprise companies, Copy.ai needed an extensible platform that allowed them to customize the end-to-end experience for their customers.

Experience with Paragon

Chris' engineers found Paragon extremely easy to use, given the clear documentation and robust support, and they were able to offload all the complex parts of building integrations, from handling authentication for thousands of users and integrations to managing and maintaining references to 3rd party APIs and webhooks.

“Paragon provides us with a unified place where we can trigger all of our webhooks as well as run all the actions needed for our customers. It's really easy to use, easy to understand and has solid documentation for you to follow. Their team has been incredible at supporting us and helping us scale.”

This led to the rapid adoption of the platform by his team, which has enabled them to go to market significantly faster with new integrations.

The Outcome

"Without Paragon, we would have had to hire a dedicated team of engineers just to help us manage the integrations. Not only managing the setup, but also the maintenance of them long term. Building this out internally would have taken at least half a year if not more... with Paragon, it allowed us to put one engineer on it and he was able to knock out multiple integrations within a few weeks."

Copy.ai was able to drastically condense its integration roadmap, shipping Salesforce, HubSpot, Slack, and Teams in a matter of weeks instead of the six months that they had originally scoped out.

The Integrations

Copy.ai has the most original implementation of Paragon we've seen to date. Within Copy.ai's workflow product, users can connect to their CRMs to perform tasks such as AI lead and company enrichment or push in AI-generated sales emails and even trigger notifications that go into Slack or Teams.

Here's a Copy.ai workflow that contains integration steps that are powered by Paragon, which showcases how their users can perform an integration action or use an integration trigger from anywhere.

Value of the integrations: increased ACV and stronger ROI

By shipping these integrations faster, Copy.ai has been able to drive more revenue from their customers earlier than if they had continued backlogging them.

"Every integration we offer allows us to drive more consumption on our platform, which in turn drives larger ACVs (average contract values). The ROI has been enormous, and the speed of these integrations helps us really bring this to market a lot faster than we otherwise could have."

Ultimately, the key indicator of value transfer for most SaaS products is consumption and usage, and with its integrations, Copy.ai can now drive significant usage without users even logging into their app.

Looking forward

‍Copy.ai has an exciting roadmap of integrations coming up, that take them deeper into their customers’ existing processes and workflows. They are gearing up to integrate with Outreach, SalesLoft, and more, aiming to delve deeper into enterprise workflows and push the boundaries of what is achievable.

"We've got a really exciting roadmap, including Outreach, SalesLoft, and many, many more. We're really excited about going deeper into our enterprise customers' workflows and enabling them to do things that they didn't think were possible with generative AI."

We’ll continue to post updates here as Copy.ai progresses on its journey to become the AI fuel for its customers’ go-to-market engines.