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When faced with the critical decision of investing resources into building a notification system in-house or focusing on its core business, how does a company make the right choice? For Topmate, the answer was clear - they needed a solution that could abstract away the complexities of building a notification system.
Topmate is a fast-growing startup enabling creators/experts to monetize their audience through personalized services like 1:1 meetings, webinars, consultations, and digital product sales. With 15k+ creators and 300k+ sessions, Topmate focuses on facilitating direct communication between creators and followers.
However, this volume of activity also means that the engineering and customer success teams are occupied with managing the core business, leaving little room for additional in-house services such as building a notification system.
Dinesh Singh, founder & CTO of TopMate, says: "When we started Topmate, we knew that building a solid notification infrastructure would be critical to our success. However, we also knew it would require significant time, tech bandwidth, and expertise, which we simply didn't want to invest in. We prioritized focusing on our core business and delivering value to our customers. So, we decided to partner with SuprSend, which allowed us to integrate notifications into our platform and scale our business quickly. It was a strategic decision that paid off, and we're happy we made it."
In the early days, TopMate utilized a basic email notification module that relied solely on Sendgrid API, and Unlayer (for templates) to communicate with its audience. As their business grew, they needed additional notification categories and channels beyond email. To prioritize product improvements, they outsourced their notification infrastructure to SuprSend. Now, they send over 100 types of notifications across various categories.
With their initial notification module, continuous iteration in templates, accessing logs on notification failures, trigger point adjustments, and fallback mechanisms weren’t readily available - and every time, the tech team would be involved.
Furthermore, with TopMate's recent launch in the US and global expansion plans, stricter data control was required with compliance laws which would be possible only when you have granular visibility over their notifications all at once.
Topmate began by moving their entire notifications into a single platform, abstracting their templates and channel integrations in code. They progressively added 100+ new notifications without much effort from the engineering team.
How? Check below!
SuprSend helped them streamline their workflows in the following manner:
TopMate had a requirement to generate four separate notifications from a single trigger, which in this case, was a booking. Each event triggered a different notification sent to preferred channels:
SuprSend easily accommodated this requirement by creating multiple notification workflows connected to a single trigger. This enabled using four different templates and respective channels for sending notifications accordingly. Now it was time to make notifications personalized for creators and their followers.
SuprSend's branding capabilities allowed for the dynamic inclusion of experts’ unique branding elements, including their logo, branding colors, social media handles, and other branding elements, in the notification templates without additional coding on TopMate's end. This made their notifications highly personalized for the followers, aiding the expert’s brand recall.
Additionally, TopMate benefited from SuprSend's flexibility in iterating notification templates and conducting A/B testing, resulting in a 66% increase in average click-through rates. With SuprSend, TopMate's team performed an average of three iterations per notification. With this, it was time to implement the highly requested Whatsapp channel.
Topmate noticed that although their email delivery rates were high at 98.3%, only 61% of their users opened the emails. To improve visibility and increase engagement, Topmate decided to integrate WhatsApp as an additional notification channel.
Using SuprSend’s dashboard, they could set up the WhatsApp integration in under 10 minutes. They simply created a WhatsApp template alongside their existing email templates using a drag-and-drop builder on the dashboard, improving overall visibility to 85%.
The results were clear!
By incorporating rapid notification build capability directly on the dashboard, TopMate could quickly test and deploy new notification use cases quickly. Within less than a month, they successfully implemented over 100 different notifications, a process that would have typically required approximately 1,000 hours of development time if built internally.
As Topmate's use cases expanded, they presented us with a unique and complex challenge. They required the ability to send notifications directly from their data warehouse based on real-time user attributes that were automatically picked from the database.
TopMate needed to send notifications (reminder campaigns) to specific sets of users and experiment a lot with notification logic and time for such notifications.
Using Bifrost, a self-hosted SuprSend tool, TopMate could create CRONs to query datasetsand send dynamic notifications to those users. It didn’t require any development efforts, as a normal SQL query was enough to run the whole notification end-to-end on the customer data warehouse.
With the surge in notification volumes, Topmate recognized the importance of effectively managing and analyzing the generated data. They needed a centralized system to get notification statuses for all the channels. This data served as a valuable resource for deriving actionable insights and making data-driven decisions to optimize their notification strategies.
SuprSend's dashboard provides a complete and holistic view of all notifications in one place. This enables TopMate's product team to have top-to-bottom visibility on each notification triggered on multiple channels via SuprSend.
Additionally, through template iterations and RCA performed centrally via SuprSend logs, Topmate has increased meeting attendance by 30% and continuously improved the user experience.
SuprSend offered TopMate a high level of abstraction for their notification service, resulting in substantial resource savings of over 1,000+ engineering hours and accelerating their time to market.
“The level of abstraction provided by SuprSend is fantastic. They have provided our users with the most meaningful omnichannel communication experience while reducing our TTL massively. Having all our notifications under one platform and handling all the complex use cases as we grow has reduced the engineering overhead massively.” says Dinesh Singh
Additionally, the centralized notification infrastructure provided by SuprSend enabled TopMate to establish additional channels swiftly, set up templates and workflows, and run notification campaigns within a few minutes. This seamless setup greatly relieved TopMate's need for rapid experimentation and scaling, empowering them to achieve their goals efficiently.
