Introducing Hookshot

As the third project in my 12 Startups in 12 Months year, I’m announcing Hookshot.

Hookshot is a managed platform for Webhook delivery. It is designed to handle the full lifecycle of a Webhook implementation, from allowing the end-user to create, manage, and inspect events, to ensuring reliable and secure delivery across a variety of potential issues.

Implementing a reliable webhook delivery system on your own feels like it should be trivial, however increases in complexity as you grow. How will you handle the security of the delivered events? Will you appropriately rate limit events to your clients, or dynamically identify a struggling endpoint and back off? Do you have the resources to implement appropriate security measures, develop a phenomenal UX for your users, and build top-notch developer tools? These are core infrastructure problems that are unrelated to your business value, and do not need to be reinvented at every company.

Hookshot uses the concept of “realms” within an account in order to isolate scopes within a given account, and grant end-users access to a set of these realms. Typically, a client would map these realms to their user’s IDs, however that is not a requirement; client can choose to nest realms as they see fit. Subscriptions are however scoped to a single realm. To make this even easier, Hookshot SDKs can create client instances already scoped to a realm. The SDK is currently Python only, however new SDKs are in the works.

Hookshot is still very early, but is already being used as the Webhook engine for all of my other projects. It is constantly being improved with new features as required, and as an extensive roadmap towards the long-term vision of providing a seamless developer experience around Webhooks and platform interconnectivity.

It is available as a SaaS solution, with the potential for self-hosted and Enterprise options in the future.

Documentation for Hookshot is a work in progress, but is available here.

A demonstration end-user application which utilizes Hookshot for webhook delivery, as well as the Hosted Management Page features, is accessible here.

Note that the Hookshot dashboard for this application is publicly accessible, so any data entered into this application should be considered publicly available.