From 0 to 320: Portable’s Framework for Scaling Product Offerings Without Losing Focus

From 0 to 320: Portable’s Framework for Scaling Product Offerings Without Losing Focus

Scaling a product offering is one of the hardest challenges in B2B tech. Do it too slowly, and you miss opportunities. Do it too quickly, and quality suffers. In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Portable founder Ethan Aaron revealed how they’ve built 320+ integrations while maintaining their commitment to quality and customer focus.

Starting with Customer Pain

Rather than building integrations based on market size or competitor analysis, Portable lets customer needs drive their roadmap. “We help data teams,” Ethan explains. The trigger often comes when “your head of HR comes to you and says, hey, Mr. And Mrs. Head of data, can you get our HR data on our applicants into a dashboard?”

When data teams face these requests but can’t access the needed systems, Portable steps in. Their entire growth strategy revolves around solving these specific pain points.

Building What Others Won’t

Instead of competing for high-volume integrations, Portable focuses on underserved needs. “We’re going after a pretty niche part of the market in the sense of like, we’re going after all the stuff that no one else wanted to build, because it’s pretty niche, pretty bespoke systems,” Ethan shares.

This approach means their development priorities come directly from customer requests: “Right now, we’re building about 30, 40% of the requests that come in, we’ll build it in a matter of hours or days.”

Quality Through Simplicity

Portable maintains quality by keeping their offering focused. As Ethan explains, “If we have it, you just sign up Portable IO, connect your data source, connect your destination, click run, and the data moves. It could take you five minutes to set the entire thing up.”

This simplicity isn’t accidental – it’s core to their scaling strategy. By focusing on doing one thing well (connecting data sources to destinations), they can maintain quality while rapidly expanding their integration catalog.

The Path to 10,000

With 320 integrations built, Portable has ambitious plans for growth. “Hopefully we get there before three years. But as I said, we want to build 10,000 integrations. Right now we’re at 320, and Zapier has got 5000. They’re the high watermark right now in the data integration world,” Ethan reveals.

This isn’t growth for growth’s sake. “That is the only thing we think about every day is how do we build the next hundred how do we build the next thousand connectors so that our clients don’t have to,” Ethan explains.

Maintaining Focus During Growth

Even as they scale, Portable maintains their focus on solving real customer problems. Every new integration comes from actual customer needs, not theoretical market analysis. This customer-driven approach helps them maintain quality while growing – they’re not building integrations that nobody wants.

For B2B founders looking to scale their product offerings, Portable’s story offers valuable lessons. Instead of trying to match competitors feature-for-feature or chasing market size estimates, they’ve grown by consistently solving real customer problems that others ignore.

The key insight isn’t just about how to build more features – it’s about maintaining clear focus even while rapidly expanding your offering. By letting customer needs drive their roadmap and staying focused on underserved segments, Portable has created a scalable approach to growth that doesn’t compromise on quality.