Zapier

Achieving #MarketingAutomation using AutopilotHQ

Some of the key aspects evaluated here: - Ability to integrate with Segment or Zapier - 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.

Back in 2014, I was given an opportunity to re-architect SmartZip Analytics platform, and flagship product: SmartTargeting. This is a SaaS software helping real estate professionals keeping up with their prospects and leads in a given neighborhood/territory, finding out (thanks to predictive analytics) who's the most likely to list/sell their home, and running cross-channel marketing automation against them: direct mail, online ads, email... The company also does provide Data APIs to Enterprise customers.

I had inherited years and years of technical debt and I knew things had to change radically. The first enabler to this was to make use of the cloud and go with AWS, so we would stop re-inventing the wheel, and build around managed/scalable services.

For the SaaS product, we kept on working with Rails as this was what my team had the most knowledge in. We've however broken up the monolith and decoupled the front-end application from the backend thanks to the use of Rails API so we'd get independently scalable micro-services from now on.

Our various applications could now be deployed using AWS Elastic Beanstalk so we wouldn't waste any more efforts writing time-consuming Capistrano deployment scripts for instance. Combined with Docker so our application would run within its own container, independently from the underlying host configuration.

Storage-wise, we went with Amazon S3 and ditched any pre-existing local or network storage people used to deal with in our legacy systems. On the database side: Amazon RDS / MySQL initially. Ultimately migrated to Amazon RDS for Aurora / MySQL when it got released. Once again, here you need a managed service your cloud provider handles for you.

Future improvements / technology decisions included:

Caching: Amazon ElastiCache / Memcached CDN: Amazon CloudFront Systems Integration: Segment / Zapier Data-warehousing: Amazon Redshift BI: Amazon Quicksight / Superset Search: Elasticsearch / Amazon Elasticsearch Service / Algolia Monitoring: New Relic

As our usage grows, patterns changed, and/or our business needs evolved, my role as Engineering Manager then Director of Engineering was also to ensure my team kept on learning and innovating, while delivering on business value.

One of these innovations was to get ourselves into Serverless : Adopting AWS Lambda was a big step forward. At the time, only available for Node.js (Not Ruby ) but a great way to handle cost efficiency, unpredictable traffic, sudden bursts of traffic... Ultimately you want the whole chain of services involved in a call to be serverless, and that's when we've started leveraging Amazon DynamoDB on these projects so they'd be fully scalable.

I've used more and more of New Relic Insights here in my work at Kong. New Relic Insights is a "time series event database as a service" with a super-easy API for inserting custom events, and a flexible query language for building visualization widgets and dashboards.

I'm a big fan of New Relic Insights when I have data I know I need to analyze, but perhaps I'm not exactly sure how I want to analyze it in the future. For example, at Kong we recently wanted to get some understanding of our open source community's activity on our GitHub repos. I was able to quickly configure GitHub to send webhooks to Zapier , which in turn posted the JSON to New Relic Insights.

Insights is schema-less and configuration-less - just start posting JSON key value pairs, then start querying your data.

Within minutes, data was flowing from GitHub to Insights, and I was building widgets on my Insights dashboard to help my colleagues visualize the activity of our open source community.

#GitHubAnalytics #OpenSourceCommunityAnalytics #CommunityAnalytics #RepoAnalytics

I use Zapier because it supplements our (Zulip's) 100 native integrations with over 1000+ products we don't currently have native integrations for. Even when we do build an integration on a customer request, it's great to be able to give an immediate workaround that's often pretty good.

I use Zapier because it is fast, easy, and flexible when I need to connect one service to another. When Zapier doesn't have pre-configured Triggers or Actions for my services, I use Zapier's awesome webhooks functionality to catch posts or poll APIs.

I chose Noticeable for it's simplicity but also its advanced features. You can create your changelog or newsfeed in seconds. It includes many options to customize the updates page along with its widget.

For teams, you can invite collaborators with dedicated rights.

Publications support Markdown, images and videos. You can schedule them in the future.

In case you need to create your own view, a great API is available.

The integration with Zapier is also really complete.

When starting a new company and building a new product w/ limited engineering we chose to optimize for expertise and rapid development, landing on Rails API, w/ AngularJS on the front.

The reality is that we're building a CRUD app, so we considered going w/ vanilla Rails MVC to optimize velocity early on (it may not be sexy, but it gets the job done). Instead, we opted to split the codebase to allow for a richer front-end experience, focus on skill specificity when hiring, and give us the flexibility to be consumed by multiple clients in the future.

We also considered .NET core or Node.js for the API layer, and React on the front-end, but our experiences dealing with mature Node APIs and the rapid-fire changes that comes with state management in React-land put us off, given our level of experience with those tools.

We're using GitHub and Trello to track issues and projects, and a plethora of other tools to help the operational team, like Zapier, MailChimp, Google Drive with some basic Vue.js & HTML5 apps for smaller internal-facing web projects.