Alternatives to HubSpot

We are looking to launch our first NPS Survey. Any recommendations on a good place to start? Tools in considering are Delighted or SurveyMonkey. Preferably link the analytics with Marketo.

I've heard that I have the ability to write well, at times. When it flows, it flows. I decided to start blogging in 2013 on Blogger. I started a company and joined BizPark with the Microsoft Azure allotment. I created a WordPress blog and did a migration at some point. A lot happened in the time after that migration but I stopped coding and changed cities during tumultuous times that taught me many lessons concerning mental health and productivity. I eventually graduated from BizSpark and outgrew the credit allotment. That killed the WordPress blog.

I blogged about writing again on the existing Blogger blog but it didn't feel right. I looked at a few options where I wouldn't have to worry about hosting cost indefinitely and Jekyll stood out with GitHub Pages. The Importer was fairly straightforward for the existing blog posts.

Todo * Set up redirects for all posts on blogger. The URI format is different so a complete redirect wouldn't work. Although, there may be something in Jekyll that could manage the redirects. I did notice the old URLs were stored in the front matter. I'm working on a command-line Ruby gem for the current plan. * I did find some of the lost WordPress posts on archive.org that I downloaded with the waybackmachinedownloader. I think I might write an importer for that. * I still have a few Disqus comment threads to map

Below is my own professional history to give some context to my current skill set. I have been a front-end dev for 18 years. My tools of choice are:

• HTML5
• CSS 3
• JavaScript
• WordPress
• PHP (but not my strongest skill as I don't write it too often)

I first of all would like to become a better and more 'full stack' developer, and I have a business idea that will hopefully allow me to move in this direction. The queries I have will result in which approach I take here. One of the most important aspects to me is the system being 'future proof'. If successful I know I will eventually bring additional developers on board, and they will likely be better developers than me! I want to avoid them having to rebuild the system and would like it to be something that they can just expand and improve on.

The business which I'd like to create is the following (in a nutshell), I have ideas for many more features, but this is how I'd like to begin:

Web-based system for gym management & marketing. Specifically a class-based gym

1. One-stop shop for a class-based gym owner
2. Sell memberships
3. Manage class bookings
4. Reporting
5. Automatically generated website
6. Choose a pre-designed template and amend the content through their dashboard
7. Marketing
8. Easily send a newsletter to members
9. Book a free trial form on the website linked directly to the booking system

Important requirements

1. One system, one dashboard. I would like the gym owner to have one place to control everything. Members, marketing, and website amendments.
2. Future proof. These features are the bare minimum and I'd like to keep expanding on the features as time goes on. Things like uploading programming for members, messaging between members and admin, and selling merchandise via the website.
3. Fast to load & secure. I live in the WordPress world right now, which isn't the fastest or most secure environment. I appreciate there are better ways to develop a system like this, but I'm a little clueless about where to start.
4. Mobile. The data created should easily communicate with a mobile app that customers will download to manage their memberships and class bookings.

TIA to anybody that can provide some guidance on where to start here.

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.

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.

We used to use Google Analytics to get audience insights while running a startup and we are constantly doing experiments to lear our users. We are a small team and we have a lack of time to keep up with trends. Here is the list of problems we are experiencing: - Analytics takes too much time - We have enough time to regularly monitor analytics - Google Analytics interface is too advanced and complicated - It's difficult to detect anomalies and trends in GA

We considered other solutions on a market, but found 2 main issues: - The solution created for analytic experts - The solution is pretty expensive and non-automated

After learning this fact we decided to create AI-powered Slack bot to analyze Google Analytics and share trends. The bot is currently working and highlights trends for us.

We are thinking about publishing this solution as a SaaS. If you are interested in automating Google Analytics analysis, drop a comment and you'll get an early access.

We will implement this solution only if we have 20+ early adaptors. Leave a message with your thought. I appreciate any feedback.

In order to accurately measure & track user behaviour on our platform we moved over quickly from the initial solution using Google Analytics to a custom-built one due to resource & pricing concerns we had.

While this does sound complicated, it’s as easy as clients sending JSON blobs of events to Amazon Kinesis from where we use AWS Lambda & Amazon SQS to batch and process incoming events and then ingest them into Google BigQuery. Once events are stored in BigQuery (which usually only takes a second from the time the client sends the data until it’s available), we can use almost-standard-SQL to simply query for data while Google makes sure that, even with terabytes of data being scanned, query times stay in the range of seconds rather than hours. Before ingesting their data into the pipeline, our mobile clients are aggregating events internally and, once a certain threshold is reached or the app is going to the background, sending the events as a JSON blob into the stream.

In the past we had workers running that continuously read from the stream and would validate and post-process the data and then enqueue them for other workers to write them to BigQuery. We went ahead and implemented the Lambda-based approach in such a way that Lambda functions would automatically be triggered for incoming records, pre-aggregate events, and write them back to SQS, from which we then read them, and persist the events to BigQuery. While this approach had a couple of bumps on the road, like re-triggering functions asynchronously to keep up with the stream and proper batch sizes, we finally managed to get it running in a reliable way and are very happy with this solution today.

#ServerlessTaskProcessing #GeneralAnalytics #RealTimeDataProcessing #BigDataAsAService

Hey everyone,

I am using Nylas on the backend for my product to schedule events. I am trying to recreate the front-end UI that is very similar to Calendly. It is called Scheduling Page UI in Nylas. They are basically the same model. Calendar of available day on the left and available time slots on the right. User chooses day -> Time slots are shown -> User Confirms timeslots.

I am wondering if there are out-of-the-box React components that can help me build this. I see it as 3 components: Calendar on the left, time on the right, and Confirm trigger. CSS animation to reveal the Confirm button.

I attached the image of Nylas, the vendor we are using. You may wonder, why do I need to build this from scratch if they already have it? It is because the API for this Scheduling Page UI is not a part of our package to use their virtual calendar on the backend to allow my users to schedule multiple events. It is a different service. They advise we building the front-end separately and use Web-hooks to connect the metadata, etc.

SUPER GREAT COMPANY! But I need some help to build the image you see in the next few days.

Any suggestions on components that I can use to piece this UI together?

If there is one tool that saved me the most time and back-and-forth communication last year, it's Calendly. It makes the process of scheduling such a no brainer that it's amazing there was nothing like it before. They recently added an integration with Zoom which makes scheduling video calls even easier.

We use G Suite because it allows us to store all of our documents and emails all in one place, with setup and sync far easier than Zoho Suite. Not only does it make it easier for us to collaborate but it allows us to have a separate place for all of our business related projects.

We are considering whether to use Salesforce Marketing Cloud or integrate ActiveCampaign into the Salesforce Sales and Service module.