Startup integrations playbook

Start with revenue-critical paths

Prioritize signup → payment → fulfillment → support. Fancy dashboard syncs can wait until money and delivery are reliable.

Prefer owned webhooks over brittle glue

No-code tools are fine for experiments. Production needs idempotency, retries, secrets management and logs your team can read at 2am.

Define the source of truth

Pick one system per entity (customer, order, subscription). Everything else should subscribe to events instead of overwriting fields at random.

Document the handoff

Founders should leave with a map: endpoints, failure modes, who gets alerted and how to roll back. That is what investors and new engineers actually need.