Successfully Scaling EmailMathew Swanson | Brian O’Neal

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SendGrid at a Glance

Successfully getting email to your audience is HARD. We have a proven email platform to power your apps and customer engagement.

2009 - TechStars Graduate

2010 – 1B emails 20 employees

2011 – 10B emails 40 employees

2012 – 40B emails 90 employees

2013 – 100B emails 180 employees

Today – 200B emails to date 200+ employees

MISSION DRIVEN

Delivering 13+ billion emails per month for 160,000+ Enterprise and SMB Customers

Overview

l  About Commissions, Inc.

l  Our progression...

l  Why SendGrid?

l  Platform metrics and statistics

l  What we've learned over the last 3 years...

l  Q & A

About Commissions, Inc. www.CommissionsInc.com

About Commissions, Inc.

l  Brian O'Neal (CTO) & Matt Swanson (Chief Software Architect)

l  Complete technology solution for real estate brokers and agents

l  We attract active and engaged home buyers to our agent and broker sites

l  We have millions of MLS property listings in the CINC platform

l  Consumer engagement is critical - property alerts

l  Work with hundreds of MLS data providers in the US and Canada

Some of MLS Providers we integrate with...

Property Alerts Each customer is able to sign up for and create a daily property alert that matches their property search criteria. From these alerts we are able to re-engage customers on behalf of each broker and agent using Commissions, Inc.

Our progression...

l  2 front end servers – 2011

l  Our own SMTP via the Rackspace Cloud

l  Using MSFT SMTP Server

l  Non-queued emails

l  Log monitoring

l  No reputation management

So what was really happening behind the scenes?

Well, here you go...

Source: SendGrid Webcast: Buy or Build? Moving Your Email to the Cloud

l  Made the transition in November 2011 - Simple inline ASP.net to deliver transactional email to customers – took 5 minutes to setup and deploy – literally.

l  We needed a real-time, fault-tolerant distributed system

l  Larger message queue based system as we scaled (25K → tens of millions/month)

l  Little code changes to progress and scale

So what did we do to integrate with SendGrid?

Why SendGrid?

l  ISP relationship management – you don't want to do this yourself.

l  It works and it's simple.

l  Less headaches and tons of APIs (parse, bounces, spam blocks, and more...)

l  How easy you ask?

<MAIL_CLIENT_HOST>smtp.sendgrid.net</MAIL_CLIENT_HOST> <MAIL_CLIENT_USER>{ID}</MAIL_CLIENT_USER> <MAIL_CLIENT_PASS>{PASS}</MAIL_CLIENT_PASS>

Load credentials from XML Config file...

Why SendGrid?

l  Custom SMTP headers for reporting

l  Know issues before your users do... (defer example)

l  Targeted reporting by device (iPhone, Android, etc.)

l  Reporting by ISP, etc.

Best of class reporting and tracking... (How does your transactional email hold up?)

Deep tracking and recon for issues... (Allows you to focus on your software, not the email deliverability.)

More reasons why SendGrid rocks.

Reputation Management (they do this for you...)

Custom Mail Headers (allows for incredible tracking)

What we learned the last 3 years...

l  Tracking, tracking, tracking – technology and client services monitoring, etc.

l  Just how many links can you put in a single email?

l  Scale = Predictable spend for your organization

l  Understanding data is critical – SendGrid delivers

What we learned the last 3 years...

l  SendGrid scaled with us, with few code changes

l  Start off small, using more APIs as you grow

l  SendGrid can offload customer service activities

l  Latest trends are brought to you – extension of team

l  We focus on our application – not email infrastructure

Extension of our team, [Albers] Workout Coach

Q & A

l  What's on your mind?

l  We'd love to answer any questions you have for us!