Alternatives to Customer.io

Customer.io Segment #Sendgrid Prior to using customer.io to automate our email campaigns, we had been using a combination of sendgrid and an engineer to manually set up campaigns in Rails. Since we had already been using segment to handle our data for other applications, integrating with customer.io took only a few minutes. Building automated email campaigns to connect and engage with our audience is a simple point and click, rules-based workflow. Importing html for emails from sendgrid to customer.io was a snap and the UX of the drag and drop editor is virtually the same as we had grown accustomed to with #sendgrid. I like that this platform has a powerful segmentation tool, which allows us to use relevant customer data such as website interaction behavior to help us craft personalized campaigns to connect with our users.

[Not currently used] We had hopes to employ this product as it has some very cool features. Customer.io

I've always been passionate about knowing more about how #UX the products that I'm building and have used a bunch of session replay tools in the past, tools like Crazy Egg Hotjar Mixpanel but i am developing affinity for FullStory. I find searching for events to be effective and fast. i live the ability to see when users are frustrated and also skip inactivity, it's pretty intuitive.

I also feel that the creating funnels could be improved (like Mixpanel ) and also give recommendations about using your data tier more efficiently.

#StackDecisionsLaunch

We needed something to send our user events to. With Segment it's super easy to get started and now we can change to whatever data destination we want. Currently Mixpanel, but now the product team can change that, without any source code change!

We are using React Native in #SmartHome to share the business logic between Android and iOS team and approach users with a unique brand experience. The drawback is that we require lots of native Android SDK and Objective-C modules, so a good part of the invested time is there. The gain for a app that relies less on native communication, sensors and OS tools should be even higher.

Also it helps us set different testing stages: we use Travis CI for the javascript (business logic), Bitrise to run build tests and @Detox for #end2end automated user tests.

We use a microservices structure on top of Zeit's @now that read from firebase. We use JWT auth to authenticate requests among services and from users, following GitHub philosophy of using the same infrastructure than its API consumers. Firebase is used mainly as a key-value store between services and as a backup database for users. We also use its authentication mechanisms.

You can be super locked-in if you also rely on it's analytics, but we use Amplitude for that, which offers us great insights. Intercom for communications with end-user and Mailjet for marketing.

I've recently switched to using Expo for initializing and developing my React Native apps. Compared to React Native CLI, it's so much easier to get set up and going. Setting up and maintaining Android Studio, Android SDK, and virtual devices used to be such a headache. Thanks to Expo, I can now test my apps directly on my Android phone, just by installing the Expo app. I still use Xcode Simulator for iOS testing, since I don't have an iPhone, but that's easy anyway. The big win for me with Expo is ease of Android testing.

The Expo SDK also provides convenient features like Facebook login, MapView, push notifications, and many others. https://docs.expo.io/versions/v31.0.0/sdk/

As a small startup we are very conscious about picking up the tools we use to run the project. After suffering with a mess of using at the same time Trello , Slack , Telegram and what not, we arrived at a small set of tools that cover all our current needs. For product management, file sharing, team communication etc we chose Basecamp and couldn't be more happy about it. For Customer Support and Sales Intercom works amazingly well. We are using MailChimp for email marketing since over 4 years and it still covers all our needs. Then on payment side combination of Stripe and Octobat helps us to process all the payments and generate compliant invoices. On techie side we use Rollbar and GitLab (for both code and CI). For corporate email we picked G Suite. That all costs us in total around 300$ a month, which is quite okay.

Sometimes #ad-blocking addons can cause a real headache when working with JavaScript apps. Onboarding assistants (Appcues + elevio ), chat (Intercom) and product usage insight (Hotjar) have all landed on their blacklists. I guess there is a perfectly good reason for this that I just don't know.

In order to fix this, we had to set up our own content delivery service. We chose Amazon CloudFront and Amazon S3 to do the job because it has a good synergy with Heroku PaaS we are already using.