Boosting Sales and Engineering Confidence with Paragon: A MainStem Case Study
Technology Category
- Application Infrastructure & Middleware - Data Exchange & Integration
- Application Infrastructure & Middleware - Middleware, SDKs & Libraries
Applicable Industries
- Cement
- E-Commerce
Applicable Functions
- Maintenance
- Sales & Marketing
Use Cases
- Building Automation & Control
- Inventory Management
Services
- System Integration
About The Customer
MainStem is a B2B SaaS supply and purchasing platform designed specifically for the cannabis industry. The company helps cannabis businesses save significant operational and supply costs by unifying their end-to-end operations. Unlike other purchasing platforms built for more traditional industries, MainStem has the necessary functionality to manage the unique workflows and regulations of cannabis companies. This has led to tremendous growth over the past few years, with the company raising their Series C with Merida Capital, being listed on the Inc 5000 fastest-growing companies in America, and being named one of Vangst’s top 20 cannabis companies to work for.
The Challenge
MainStem, a B2B SaaS supply and purchasing platform for the cannabis industry, was faced with a significant challenge. The company's Chief Technology Officer, Garrett, was dealing with three crucial integration requests (Teams, Slack, and Quickbooks) simultaneously. However, his team was unable to prioritize these integrations as they were focused on developing core product features for their enterprise offering, Purchase Pro. Existing customers were frustrated due to the lack of MainStem notifications in their messaging apps, and potential enterprise clients required QuickBooks integration for decision-making. Previously, MainStem had built numerous integrations in-house, but these required significant engineering effort to build and maintain. The team would spend weeks understanding the API documentation for each third-party app, dealing with user authentication and token management, and maintaining the integrations due to changing vendor APIs. This approach had several drawbacks, including diverting engineering resources from their core product, impacting sales and customer success team's confidence in their integration roadmap, and increasing maintenance requirements.
The Solution
Recognizing the need for a more sustainable solution, Garrett began exploring embedded integration platforms and discovered Paragon. He signed up for a free trial and was able to build a working Slack integration within four hours. Despite initial doubts about Paragon's ability to handle complex integration workflows, the MainStem team found that they could access any API endpoints for every integration through Paragon. This allowed them to build out more complex business logic, even for more intricate use cases. Paragon's managed authentication, full endpoint visibility, and clean, out-of-the-box end-user UI enabled MainStem to reduce the full-time dedicated development work by 70%. The implementation of Paragon not only shortened their sales cycles and enabled them to close enterprise customers with accounting integration requirements, but it also boosted the confidence of their sales team. The engineering team's sentiment towards integration requests improved significantly, and they even considered rebuilding existing in-house integrations onto the Paragon platform.
Operational Impact
Quantitative Benefit
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