API integration

An API integration is connecting your product to another service through its API so the two share data or trigger actions automatically, pulling payments from Stripe, sending email through a provider, syncing contacts to a CRM. Rather than rebuilding a solved problem, you wire in an existing service and let it do the heavy lifting. For a lean founder, integrations are leverage: they let a tiny team offer rich functionality by standing on the infrastructure of larger players. The judgement is choosing what to integrate versus build, and accepting the dependency that comes with it. An integration ties you to someone else's uptime, pricing, and rate limits, and credentials must be stored securely, never hard-coded or pasted into chat. Done well, each integration replaces weeks of work and ongoing maintenance with a connection you configure once. The skill is reading the provider's docs properly first, so you wire it to how it actually works, not how you assume it does.