Intercom

Achieving #MarketingAutomation using AutopilotHQ

Some of the key aspects evaluated here:

• Ability to integrate with @{Segment}|tool:5| or @{Zapier}|tool:286|
• Being multi-channel (Not just Email automation)
• Dozens of integrations and capabilities: SFDC, In app messages, SMS, Push Notifications, Direct Mail, Segment Events...
• Allowing teams to operate outside of engineering dependencies
• Segmentation against user attributes / user traits
• Static or Dynamic segments
• Concept of user journeys
• And more

Combined with Segment and its own sets of integrations and capabilities, AutopilotHQ ended up being a very powerful tool for Product Marketing to use at SmartZip.

Couple of years later, there certainly were some overlap with the features offered by Intercom 's engagement module , but our team kept on using this tool given the greater range of functionality / capabilities.

Ember.js PHP MySQL Propel Slim Intercom

Mostly CRUD app, using propel orm, jsonapi serializers and ember.js frontend, this app was in ember 2.16 and we recently upgraded without any issue to 3.15, propel is super good as ORM, slim is a thin framework basically for routing and middleware

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.

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.