I listed Engage AI on Microsoft and HubSpot's Markplaces and here is what happened
Spoiler: It didn't bring a flood of users. It brought something much better.
Growth, every founder is desperate for it.
We all chase the same three things: more traffic, more customers and more trust with them.
But the real problems are a level deeper. The problem with “getting traffic” is that you’re screaming into a void, competing against SEO and ad budgets bigger than your entire annual revenue. The problem with “gaining trust” is that, as a new product, you have none. You’re a new name, a small logo. To a potential customer, you look less like an opportunity and more like a risk. They wonder, “Is this real? Will they be gone in six months?”
What if there was a growth strategy that didn’t rely on a massive ad budget? One that let you borrow the trust of a trillion dollar company and, at the same time, gave you a secret key to unlock their enterprise customers?
This was the puzzle I faced as a bootstrapped founder.
I couldn’t just light money on fire with Google or Facebook ads. I didn’t have an army of salespeople to pound the phones. I didn’t have a budget to burn through SEO. I couldn’t follow the venture backed playbook of acquiring customers at a loss and hoping to “make it up on scale” someday. I had to build a real, profitable business from day one.
I had to find leverage. I had to find a way to plug Engage AI into an existing, trusted ecosystem.SThat’s what led me to B2B marketplaces. It was a significant shift in strategy, but not at all in the ways I expected.
We eventually listed Engage AI across a wide range of ecosystems:
Microsoft Azure
Microsoft AppSource
AWS
HubSpot
Hootsuite
Zoho
Pipedrive
...and more.
Here is a breakdown of what we learned from our own journey getting Engage AI listed on B2B marketplaces. These lessons can save you months of guesswork and help you navigate this path far more effectively.
What to Expect (The Long Term Wins)
1. It boosts visibility and SEO through valuable links.
This isn’t about a sudden rush of traffic. It’s about building a foundation. When Engage AI got its first listing on a major platform’s marketplace, the most immediate, tangible benefit was a high authority, “do-follow” backlink.
For a bootstrapped product, getting a link from a domain with an authority score of 90+ is SEO gold. It’s Google’s equivalent of a Fortune 500 CEO giving you a personal reference. It tells search engines, “This little app is legitimate. We’ve vetted them.” We saw our own domain authority slowly but surely climb after each listing. It’s a long game, but it’s a powerful one for discoverability.
2. It increases trust and confidence with your customers.
This is about borrowing credibility. As a new company, you’re fighting an uphill battle for trust. When a potential customer is on the fence, they’re wondering, “Is this a real company? Is my data safe with... well, with you?”
The “Listed on the [Mega Platform] Marketplace” logo on our landing page became a powerful shortcut to an answer. It’s social proof by association. The customer isn’t just trusting Engage AI; they’re trusting the platform’s rigorous vetting process. It immediately defuses the “are you guys real” objection. We started closing more team deals because the manager signing up could point to the listing as part of their internal due diligence.
3. It gives you easier access to enterprise budgets.
This is the real, hidden prize. Large companies want to buy your tool, but their procurement and legal departments are built to say “no.” They have security checklists and vendor forms that can take six months to clear.
A marketplace listing bypasses this entire nightmare. You’ve already passed the security, compliance, and legal review of their preferred vendor (the mega platform). We found the conversation with larger teams changed completely. Instead of a long procurement battle, the question just became, “Can we add Engage AI to our existing Microsoft bill?” It’s a magic key that unlocks budgets you could never access on your own.
What Not to Expect (The Reality Check)
1. It will not bring you lots of traffic immediately.
We had this fantasy. We thought launching on a marketplace would be like hitting the top of Product Hunt. We expected a wave of new users.
The reality was a tiny trickle. A few curious clicks. That’s it. We learned that these marketplaces are not discovery engines. People do not browse the Salesforce AppExchange for fun on a Friday night. They go there with a specific, pre-existing problem, often to find a tool they’ve already heard of. Your listing is a destination for validation and purchase, not a source of discovery.
2. The platform’s salespeople will not refer you customers.
This was our next, related fantasy. “A HubSpot sales rep will see Engage AI and pitch it to all their clients!”
Why would they? They are paid to sell HubSpot, not your $50 a month add on. You are one of thousands of apps in their catalog. We learned fast that we were completely on our own. We got zero, and I mean zero, inbound leads from the platform’s internal sales teams. That relationship is something you have to build from scratch, and it starts with you proving your value to them first.
3. It will not be an easy or quick listing.
This was the part that nearly broke us. As a solo founder with a lean team, our time is our only real asset. I thought it would be a simple web form.
It was a gauntlet. It’s not a marketing task; it’s a full blown engineering and legal project. Our listing with Microsot took almost 6 months of work. This included reading tremendous documentations, building new API endpoints for their specific workflow, refactoring parts of our code to meet their security demands, and filling out pages of legal and security questionnaires. It is a significant, time consuming technical lift. Do not underestimate it.
What You Should Do (The Strategy)
1. Understand if they have your target audience.
Don’t just chase the biggest platform name; chase the right audience. For Engage AI, our ideal users are B2B sales teams who use LinkedIn. Where do those people live all day? In their CRMs. This made the HubSpot and Salesforce ecosystems a perfect fit.
Listing on the Atlassian (Jira) marketplace, for example, would have been a total waste of time, even though it’s a huge platform. The audience of developers and IT ops managers simply doesn’t overlap with our ideal customer. We had to be ruthless and pick the one platform where our customers already spent their entire day.
2. Understand what incentivises the platform and its salespeople.
After learning their sales team wouldn’t help us, we had to figure out what does motivate them. The platform itself is motivated by stickiness. They want your app to make their platform more valuable, so customers never leave.
The partner managers (your internal contacts) are motivated by co-marketing wins and case studies they can show to their bosses. We stopped asking, “Can you promote us?” We started saying, “We just helped [Mutual Customer] close two extra deals this month by connecting Engage AI to your CRM. Would that make a good case study for your blog?” You have to do all the work and then hand them the win.
3. Orchestrate some existing purchases via the marketplace.
This was the most effective tactic we used. As soon as we were approved and listed, we went to our existing customers who we knew also used that platform.
We emailed them and asked, “As a huge favor, could we transfer your subscriptions with Engage AI through the marketplace? And if you have 60 seconds, could you leave us a review?” This did three critical things:
It gave us immediate social proof (those first 5 star reviews are vital).
It flagged our app in the marketplace’s algorithm as an app that was getting traction.
It helped us meet the financial thresholds set by the platform. This is crucial. Once you hit certain revenue tiers, you move up to a new partner level. Only then do the partner managers and sales teams really start to pay attention, because you are now actively making them money.
You have to prime the pump. Don’t wait for strangers to find you; bring your own crowd first.
4. Once you identify a winner, integrate deeper.
That first listing is just getting your foot in the door. The real, long term value comes from becoming indispensable.
Once we saw that the HubSpot ecosystem was sending us good customers, we doubled down. We moved from a simple “works with” integration to a deep integration. We built features so users could pull contact data from HubSpot and, more importantly, push conversation data back into HubSpot.
This makes your product incredibly sticky. It’s no longer a separate tool; it’s a feature of the platform they already pay for. This is the point where the platform’s sales and success teams finally start to notice you, because you are actively helping them sell their product by making it more valuable. That’s the real end game.
The Billion Dollar Version of This Playbook
If you’re wondering just how powerful this ‘deep integration’ strategy can be, look at Veeva Systems.
They built their entire, multi-billion dollar business by executing this playbook to perfection. They didn’t try to compete with Salesforce. They saw that the entire pharmaceutical and life sciences industry needed a specialised, compliant CRM. So, they built it on top of the Salesforce platform.
They leveraged Salesforce’s trust, their security, and their enterprise-ready infrastructure to become the non-negotiable standard in their vertical. They are a textbook example of turning a platform partnership into an empire. This isn’t just about getting a few extra leads; it’s about strategic, foundational positioning.
Your Turn
So, is a B2B marketplace a magic bullet for growth? Absolutely not.
It’s not a source of ‘traffic.’ It’s a source of leverage.
It’s a strategic choice. It’s trading a heavy, short-term engineering effort for long-term trust, SEO authority, and a master key to unlock enterprise doors you can’t even knock on right now.
Your challenge isn’t to go list on all those marketplaces tomorrow. Your challenge is to do the research.
Look at your absolute best customers. Where do they really live all day? Is it HubSpot? Is it Salesforce? Is it Microsoft Teams?
Stop trying to pull them to your tiny island. Go to their continent.
The path is rigorous, and it’s not a ‘quick win.’ But for a bootstrapped founder, leverage isn’t just nice to have. It’s everything.