Xerocon 2017 Melbourne (and Xero HQ Apps)
Last week Melbourne hosted the biggest Xerocon to date! On Wednesday morning a procession of 3000 accountants and bookkeepers rolled into the Xerocon exhibitor hall to be met by, the pounding beats of Xerocon. It looked like a festival, it sounded like a festival and everyone there made it feel the part too.
DJ’s, lawn games, neon hoodies, racing kart sims, swing sets, gourmet food, neon lights, graffiti walls, a silent disco, after parties, I think this might be a festival.
And so it began, two days of soaking up Xero’s new products, mingling with ecosystem partners, making new friends & seeing old faces.
Rod Drury was first up, and in his typical ‘lets do this’ style, announced all the things: Projects, Expenses, XeroHQ Apps, 35k developers, 600+ Connected Apps, new Xero Connect partners and the list goes on.
(Much to horror of product owners, but I like the mans style. It’s great to have a technical CEO who gets excited about product!!)
With 600+ apps in the Xero Marketplace, I was always skeptical about this 35k developers number. Until recently it’s been only discussed internally, but I always questioned it. Why would we have so many developers using our platform, but not publishing apps? Well efficiency and internal tools seems to be the reason. Not everyone wants to share their secret sauce, and not all secret sauces can be productised. Over the two days I met plenty of accountant/bookkeeper come developers that are using the Xero API to automate their businesses. With our XD Hax hackathon in full swing at the moment, I encouraged them to submit some of their work, but (bar one) when we delved deeper it was pretty clear their tools were suitable only to their business. From music royalty management to power user interfaces, there’s a lot going on behind the scenes in the ecosystem.
Xero HQ Apps
The biggest announcement for developers over the two days of Xerocon was Xero HQ Apps.
The 9 partners integrated for the launch of Xero HQ Apps are Practice Ignition, Receipt Bank, FUTRLI, Fathom, Hubdoc, Spotlight Reporting, Now Infinity, SuiteFiles & BOMA. Check out this blog post for more details on what each integration does.
Xero HQ is a brand new platform for Xero’s accounting & bookkeeping partners (and it’s free!). The two big wins here for developers are: Client List & Activity Feed.
If you’re interested in integrating with Xero HQ, fill out our partner form and select “Xero HQ”. We will be vetting use cases thoroughly for Xero HQ, in particular integrations to the Activity Feed. We will be moving forward cautiously in order to maintain the value of notifications within the Activity Feed. We’re aiming for high value and low noise, so keep that in mind when you’re brain storming your use cases. Also keep in mind, you can continuously update a notification within the activity feed, and even remove it. So a notification should always be relevant when it’s in the feed.
Once you’ve filled out that form, myself or someone else from the Developer Evangelist team will get in contact to flesh out your use cases.
Projects & Expenses (API enabled):
Projects & Expenses were also released into beta at Xerocon. Projects has been incredibly popular, within 4 days of the event the beta had already reached capacity (we’ve since added capacity). These products are scheduled to move out of beta in early 2018, and in line with the full release, their API’s will go live! So check out these products now and determine how you might integrate. There are no docs online yet, but if you’re super interested, reach out to the DE team and we can chat about what will be possible and share docs as soon as they’re available.
Demo Stages
I’ve been to quite a few Xerocon’s now, and one thing that’s always been a little under cooked were the demo stages. We know how valuable these are to partners (we took them away one year, bad bad idea), but it’s hard to get them right. The exhibitor hall can be a noisy place, there are keynotes & breakout sessions going on everywhere, but the demo areas can’t be hidden away or no one will find them. We this year I think we nailed it. They were visible from the floor, got plenty of foot traffic and in conjunction with the silent disco breakout sessions, everyone was easily heard. As always, if you were there, let us know what you thought. Your feedback makes this event better every year.
Award Winners
There were three awards on offer to partners at Xerocon Melbourne. Congratulations to the three winners, Figured, Practice Ignition & Approval Max.
And that’s that
A massive shoutout to partners that exhibited this year. With more attendees than ever before, and slightly less exhibitors, there was time to get around to everyone, and a quick look at the numbers shows that has translated into stacks of leads for everyone involved! Xerocon 2018 will be back in Brisbane. See you all again next year!
