What are the biggest "wow" moments in tech you remember?

I mean, you saw a company do something, and you knew they would do pretty well!

For me, two come to mind immediately: Stripe's docs, and Zapier's connection pages.

In my early career, I was building custom web applications for clients at an agency. Sometimes that involved some sort of payment aspect. PayPal was usually a good choice, but what about something more white-label or with better fees? PayPal was OK, but it didn't always offer a "guest checkout" option (if I recall correctly), and users needed to sign up. (Sometimes they still need to for some reason!)

Moreover, if you wanted to build with subscriptions and payment notifications, or split payments, the developer experience was awful. PayPal had a sandbox, and you could send standard payment notifications to your server, but nothing more fancy. How should you test subscriptions or pre-auth and payment later workflows?

There was a way, but it was a hack. I had to modify the HTML form to include additional fields and data. Let’s overlook the fact that doing this actually worked (it shouldn’t… security? 🤷‍♂️), the fact that I had to do this created friction. I didn’t want to build using PayPal again.

Then I found Stripe, but it wasn’t available in the U.K. at the time. I reached out, and ended up being able to use it pre-release in the U.K. (they sent me a tee too, nice touch!). I could easily look at the docs and then quickly test practically everything, right there. This was a breath of fresh air, and after that, I advocated for using Stripe over anything else.

It’s documented that Stripe cares deeply about clear communication and writing, but their docs did more. They recognised that developers actually had some call in deciding what services to use.

Today, Stripe has grown way beyond just a checkout payment service, and I’ve followed their growth until it became too rapid for me to keep up. Their docs are still hailed as game-changing, and many projects are based on their design. Stripe docs raised the bar for documentation in a way that nothing else has since, and it’s been quite a few years.

Zapier is a pretty awesome low-code connector platform. I even did a case study with them last year! There was a bit of a land grab some time ago for low-code solutions, and many companies no longer exist. You could argue the completion is still ongoing as companies pivot and mature, and you’d be right, but Zapier cemented itself as a leader.

Besides the impressive technical approach used to scale connectors, getting the owning companies to submit and maintain them, Zapier had a neat trick to make it easier for people to find THEM as the solution to their specific problem. Connect X to Y, for any variation that they support of X and Y, generating individual pages. Gmail to Evernote? A page. Twitter to SMS? A page. When you search for connecting one thing to another in your search engine of choice, Zapier has a specific page for exactly that, and seeing that page in the results was eye-catching.

Of course, this approach has been noticed and commented on by others, so I won't go over all the details. But it was smart. And it built a user base as a result. It got people to the value they were looking for quickly.

For a small SaaS product, you can’t build connectors to everything, but you can expose an API, and you can connect to Zapier (and others today). Suddenly, you can bookmark links you tweet when you use a specific hashtag, or create a draft WordPress post when a new post in an RSS feed was published. I could go on, but given how many combinations and use cases there are, I think we would both get bored quickly.

Automatic content creation is generally seen as a poor choice for marketing, and even more so with AI today. But, the use case Zapier had, and their approach, made sense. It was a novel approach, and it worked. Creating all those pages manually would have taken too long.

Developers searching for a solution to connect X to Y might be looking for a domain-specific service, having failed to quickly connect the two services, due to poor API documentation. A last-ditch attempt… and a low-effort solution presents itself. Zapier’s content automation enabled potential customers to easily find a solution, and that was a great move.

Zapier has evolved a lot since, and there are more mature and more targeted similar solutions, but Zapier remains a pioneer in growth and reach, the likes of which Yahoo Pipes never saw. Maybe they were too early, or perhaps it just wasn’t marketed the right way to gain the user base it needed to commercialise.

You might be asking, “You’re a developer, so why are you taking about and caring about seeing these wow moments? They sound a lot like business things, like product positioning and strategy!?” I think they highlight two cases where companies focused on or found how to communicate and capitalise on their business value more than others. Impactful on the industry scale.

Build it and they will come only works if you get lucky or you already have a huge network in the first place. If you’re targeting a market you’re not already part of, you have to do some additional work. You have to put yourself in the shoes of the end user. You have to understand the value proposition and communicate it as clearly as you can.

I try to always keep a product-focused mindset. To me, this means understanding the impact of a change beyond just ticking off an item in the backlog. This might be something you’re only confident to do as you develop in your career, but it also might be something you can do as a junior too.

Before I started writing code professionally, I wrote freeware reviews. Trying, testing, playing with free software, and then writing a critical but engaging review, exercises two super useful muscles: evaluating what makes good and bad software, and clear communication with a specific objective. Seeing a wide variety of software is going to expose a scale of quality. Being able to articulate what makes one thing preferable and another not, has continually proved a useful tool in my box.

I hugely enjoy writing. I used to be less critical, putting out multiple reviews a week after school, but those days have long passed. I’m working on publishing less perfect content in favour of actually publishing, so this may be a little rough, but I’m getting the thought out while it’s fresh.

I genuinely look forward to hearing your insights, whatever the stage of your career today.

Photo by Tim Bogdanov on Unsplash