Doing more with less
Recently, I was reflecting on the work that has gone into making an add-on framework for Squirrel365. And how, at the heart of it, Add-ons let you do more with less.
A few years ago I was at a conference and attended a session run by the Head of Partners. Amongst all the sales information the speaker gave a brief history of how he transitioned from being in sales to managing partners. I’m paraphrasing but the general gist was:
He was a great salesman but he realised that he couldn’t sell any more products unless he found a way to add more hours to the day. However, by introducing partners, he could have a network of salespeople selling on his behalf. Why add more hours in the day if you can clone yourself instead.
The story of why he moved into managing partners stuck with me. I work in development, not sales, but the idea of having a network of people enhancing a product really appeals to me. There are plenty of examples where this approach has been successfully implemented and a thriving ecosystem of add-ons, plugins, integrations, or whatever you want to call them has grown.
Add-ons are everwhere
Visual Studio has NuGet and VS Code has extensions. With countless plugins, addons and libraries to allow you to make pretty much anything you can imagine. Created by Microsoft and a large and active community of developers.
But it’s not just limited to technical tools. Products like Webflow and WordPress have a massive collection of free and commercially available plugins and themes too. Productivity tools like Confluence from Atlassian have a large swathe of add-ons and integrations.
Moreover, the success of design tools, such as Figma and Canva, can in large be attributed to their huge active community. These people are contributing new components, plugins and templates every day.
Over the past 12 months, we have been busy working on our addon framework for Squirrel365. In the next release of Squirrel we will be making the framework available for our community. This should make it possible for everyone to become involved in enhancing and evolving Squirrel.
Our product team alone, can’t build all the components, visualisations, integrations and templates that people want. There just aren’t enough hours in the day. But with a community of developers and enthusiasts joining the effort, we can make Squirrel a no-code platform where you can create pretty much anything you can imagine.
I can’t wait to see what our community comes up with. There will be some exciting times ahead.
If you are new to Squirrel and looking to see what you can do with it (even without Add-ons) have a look at the core features.
