The New Notification Stack for Developers - Seth Carney

CTO, Courier

Noah:

Welcome back, listeners. Today we are continuing our series entitled The New Notifications Stack for Developers brought to you by our longtime friends and sponsors of the Code Story podcast Courier. As a reminder, Courier is developer infrastructure for product notifications, making it easier to deliver the notification experience that your customers expect. Check out their product to learn more at Courier.com.

Noah:

Well, today I have two special guests on the Code Story podcast, Seth Carney, CTO at Courier, and Ben Link, the developer advocate at Twilio Segment. Gentlemen, thank you for being on the show today.

Seth:

Yeah, great to be here.

Ben:

Yeah, good to be here.

Noah:

Before we jump into, you know, Segment and Courier and today's topic, I'd love for you guys to tell me a little bit more about yourselves. Give my audience a little bit of context about who you are. Seth, why don't you kick us off?

Seth:

You know, as you mentioned in the intro there, I am the CTO here, at Courier, been an engineer developer for more than 20 years now, really found my home at startups years ago. Just love building product. And you know, I love building something that people use. So I feel right at home and Courier building a dev tool, interacting with people that I feel like are kind of part of my tribe.

Noah:

Awesome. Ben, how about you?

Ben:

I've been in the industry for about 20 years now. The majority of those roles were with one company, and I sort of hopped around to see how things looked from different seats on the bus. So I've done like application support and then I've done development and then I did some infrastructure design, lots of different hats that I've worn along the way.

Ben:

One of the things that I fell in love with throughout that experience was just working with the engineering community. I love hanging out with people who build cool stuff and helping them clear obstacles so that they can continue to build that cool stuff. Most recently at Twilio Segment, I’ve started into the developer advocacy role, the evangelism role, where I get to hang out with people and do exactly that for a full time job.

Ben:

So that that's kind of my story in a nutshell.

Noah:

You both have really cool jobs, really cool roles, and as you describe them, I want to go build something with you both. Before we go into that, though, let's get an overview of Segment and Courier. Ben, tell me what Segment is, and Seth, tell me what Courier is, and then how do you two work together? Ben, let's start with you?

Ben:

Sure. So Segment is what's called a CDP, a customer data platform. And the general gist of how it works, what it does, is that you've got all these different ways that you interact with your customer base. You probably have a website and you have a mobile app, and if you have one mobile app, you have two because you've got to have it in both app stores.

Ben:

Maybe some of my buddies over at Twilio have hooked you up with some like messaging components or, you know, other engagement tools that Twilio is well known for. You've got all this data that's collected about the expiring ins of your customer, right? You start to learn about them, you learn about their preferences. What products do they view? What things do they like and dislike?

Ben:

What are the buying signals when you know they're going to get really excited about something? And so that data has lived in lots of different places and it's the job of engineering to integrate that data into a a profile of some sort that they can share with people so that your marketing team knows how to reach them better so that your salespeople know when it's time to engage all those different seats on the bus along the way that are really important to making, you know, the business money.

Ben:

They need data that's accurate and it's well thought out and it's cleaned up. And so Segment gives you a way to connect to all of those data source locations and centralize the information and synthesize a profile for your customer and then share it out to hundreds of different integrations that you could have in your stack. So whatever tools you have for your marketing team or your product teams to look at, to use that data in their intelligence gathering processes, it's the central point to connect all those things.

Seth:

Courier is your notification infrastructure. We provide an API and a web studio for development teams, product teams to manage all of their product triggered communications, email, SMS, push, chat, those types of things. And you know, Ben really talks a lot about great profile data, getting all these events in around behaviors and triggers and things like that that lets you know interesting things that people are doing in your application that might lead to further engagement, that might lead to deeper integration, those types of things.

Seth:

And Courier provides the API to help engage with all of those folks. We are a dev tool and so through a single API you can deliver this messaging through any channel, right? That we mentioned above and many, many more. But with Segment, what's really interesting is a lot of engineering teams have already done the work to plumb the capture of all these events, the capture of this profile data. Segment provides a lot of really great capabilities around pulling profile data from different sources and really enriching it.

Seth:

Courier can really make use of all of that fantastic data that's being pumped through there so we can listen to events that are occurring. We can trigger all kinds of workflows that happen, notification and profile updates, subscriptions, all kinds of other interesting things, and in addition to that, provide a full circle integration, providing a lot of information back to Segment.

Noah:

Rock and roll. Okay. So in my next in my next question is one of the things I really enjoy when I get to talk about this topic is hearing the value of product notification, hearing. What is the value? And I want to ask that generally to both of you: Why are product notifications such an important part of the overall product experience?

Ben:

So product notifications are becoming more and more important because technology has taken over. If you look back 20, 30 years, whatever it was, the way we engaged with companies for pretty much anything was to get on a telephone and dial them up and talk to a person. The famous analogy would be something like I use the Sears catalog, I do my shopping, and then I call in my order and they ship it to my house.

Ben:

And that was a big deal back then because we didn't have the technology that we live in today, and particularly over the last couple of years with the way that COVID changed the landscape of things. People are relying on those remote connections a lot more than they do the in-store experience and personalization of those online experiences was never as important before.

Ben:

I mean, it kind of mattered, but it really became important over the last couple of years because it was the only way that we engaged with each other. If you don't offer a personalized experience, that's no longer a differentiator, that's table stakes.

Seth:

Absolutely. And there's also been, I would say, an explosion in terms of, you know, I use the word channels in which people are communicated with. But the way people push information to us has really, I think, exploded is the right word. You have your email, your SMS, you have push messaging, you have Slack or Teams for your work messaging.

Seth:

You have all kinds of different vectors. This messaging is coming in and it can be overwhelming, right? Trying to manage it. I think Ben brought up a really great term personalization, right? Expressing your preferences, expressing how you want to receive messages, get information, making sure it fits how you consume things. I think it's become really important. I think that has become table stakes.

Seth:

People expect that level of personalization, being able to say how they want something. When they want something, it's no longer a game changer, right? It's what they expect when they come to the table.

Noah:

Okay, so this one's for you, Seth. So what does it take to build product notifications in-house, embedding it into an application platform? What does it take?

Seth:

There's a difference between building in-house notifications and building a great notification experience for your customers. I think when you look at barebones things like, “Hey, I want to sign up for Twilio and I want to send an SMS to my customers.” Well, there's actually not that much that goes into that actual call, right? But you do have to do phone number, capture and things like that.

Seth:

Realistically, though, when we talk about the explosion of channels that you can communicate with, when you talk about preferences and being able to support those things, offering different capabilities to your users, it becomes important. How do they want to receive that message? So now you need multi-channel notifications, you need tracking, you need to understand when they opened, it clicked on links that are within it.

Seth:

You need to understand when you have problems, you need to understand whether you've got delivery issues with a given provider. You do fail over. When you have issues and outages. You need to do template design. When you're larger than a team of a single engineer who's fine pushing all of the code to a Github repository.

Seth:

The list kind of starts getting long depending on your business and what you're trying to achieve. You need branding or white labeling. You haven't even started touching on workflows and automations and things like that when you want to run a sequence or a campaign. I think you can look at notifications and say it's an iceberg, and to build very simple notifications probably isn't the hardest thing in the world, but to build a great experience and something that's reliable and that you can drive engagement off of is definitely a significant undertaking.

Noah:

Yeah, it sounds like there's a lot to it. Okay, so over to you, Ben. Why are product driven notifications in particular so difficult to implement, scale, manage things like that?

Ben:

It's hard enough to build a notification system. Right. You've got all the channels and things that Seth was talking about, but when you want to make it product driven, you now have to capture data from all over the place. And as I sort of alluded to in the opening, the data is spread out. It's in lots of different places.

Ben:

And pulling all that together to know that, you know, for instance, Ben was shopping on the website, but then you didn't realize this. He got called away from his desk and instead of finishing up there, he just popped on his phone and opened the site there and finished the shopping experience while he was, you know, waiting in line.

Ben:

Being able to track those things and know that they happened with the same person over the same shopping experience, even though it was in two different channels. That's the challenge here, is being able to stitch it all together.

Noah:

Okay. That makes sense. Seth, how does this new integration approach simplify this?

Seth:

Candidly speaking, Segment is probably the fastest way to get up and running with Courier. If you've already got a Segment installed and are collecting events and data without doing any work, Courier was already acting as a destination for Segment events. So we were already doing things like automatic profile capture for identifies and you can run automations against events that are flowing through Segment and being piped to Courier.

Seth:

What we've newly released is Courier as a source, so we've completed that circle. You can now add Courier as a source of events and will pipe all the interesting things that are happening within the Courier ecosystem back in the Segment. And that of course, allows you to take advantage of those hundreds of destinations that Ben mentioned earlier. You can pump it into your BI tools, you can use them for journeys, you can do all of the great things that are part of the Segment platform.

Noah:

Okay. So Seth, let's stay with you for a minute. What were the first steps of building this integration? You know, tell me about the beginning of the integration and how it has evolved.

Seth:

Primarily, this integration has been more customer driven. When we first built Courier as a destination, it was because we were seeing folks coming through who were interested in driving their notifications based on Segment events that they had already wired up, specifically because the pain to adopting was basically zero. And it's actually really easy to adopt Courier already, but they were literally already a Segment customer,

Seth:

they were already pumping events through, capturing profile data, those types of things. So all they had to do was wire the two systems together with a couple of keys and start sending notifications, which was great for them. And honestly, our source integration has been driven much in the same way. So we've gotten feedback along the way that not only is the destination useful, but so is the source.

Seth:

And so we followed up and started sending that information back through. You know, honestly, we would just let the customer drive the product, change their good stuff.

Noah:

Okay, We've spoken about Courier as a Segment source and a destination. So for Courier, what are some of the common use cases that you've seen when setting Courier as a destination for Segment? Give me a little bit of some stories there.

Seth:

We actually use it when you sign up for Courier. We actually have a sequence that we run and it's where we send you a welcome to Courier message. And thank you for signing up. Of course, know, we follow up with some tips and tricks and things like that, but they're basically a set of messages that we then run as a result of your assignment.

Seth:

Ben and I were on a livestream just about a week back. We implemented a come back and check out notification set pretty quickly. I think we've all seen this right where you go add a bunch of items to your cart, you get anxiety and pre-buyer's remorse and don't check out you leave the site and then of course, you get the reminders that we'd love for you to come back and check out and hey, maybe here's a coupon code.

Seth:

And we were able to wire that up. Obviously probably in about ten or fifteen minutes using Segment and Courier. Gosh, we see tons and tons of use cases. We have one customer who does scheduling and once the events are scheduled, they trigger events through Segment that are received by Courier, where then we start the notification processes, reminders, things like that.

Seth:

So lots of different things.

Noah:

That's a testament to the product integration being that you guys are using it yourself. So, okay, switch over to Ben. What does it mean for Segment to now have access to this notification data from Courier? You what what can Segment users do that they couldn't before?

Ben:

I think this is the most exciting part for me. You know, given my engineering background, the time that I spent being a developer was about making cool things and trying to to add on to something that someone else had done and the ability to create feedback loops. So we hear a lot of this, you know, like particularly the DevOps community will, will be on the soapbox about DevOps.

Ben:

Feedback loops being developed throughout the organization. This is one of those feedback loops for a customer of Segment. Having Courier is a destination is a really cool feature because I can now communicate with my customers. But there's always that nagging question left in the back of your mind: Did my communication, you know, land properly? Was it successful?

Ben:

What do I know about that? You know, where's my feedback as the person, you know, sending the communication as to whether it was effective or not. Being able to wire up Courier on the other end to say, hey, Courier saw that the message went out and they saw the person open the message and they saw they engaged with it.

Ben:

And all the events that we can then pull back in to enrich that story further. I would say it's curing the blindness that you can have in a marketing organization to not know whether I was effective at communicating. But now I can see that information come back into play and and now I can make decisions based on whether they did.

Ben:

A common example here might be how long is it before someone rage unsubscribes from your service? You know, if you think about that, that you know, it only takes a couple of emails where I'm like, I am tired of getting the ding on my phone and realizing that it's another junk message from those people and unsubscribe. But if you look at that, you can probably find behavior patterns in that data that will help you as the person sending the emails not to ever trigger that rage.

Noah:

I am definitely going to make a T-shirt that says rage unsubscribe. If there's not one out there, there should be. Guys, this is really exciting. It's a rich integration. It's a rich set of tools that are enabling developers and builders of platforms to do a lot. Where is this integration going over time? Give me a little bit of the of the future vision there.

Seth:

Realistically, it's going to be customer driven, right? Just like I think the evolution of the product as far as has been, you know, what we really hope is that folks get out there and they use the product, they use Courier as both a source and a destination, and they provide us a bunch of great feedback, feedback that we can learn from and that we can make the product better from.

Seth:

That's really the way we we'd like to evolve, the integration.

Noah:

Guys. This is an easy sell, right? I'm sold, I'm an engineer, I'm going to build something. I'm sold. This is this has got everything I want and need and it's going to help my team understand what these notifications are doing and cure the blindness, like Ben said. How can I get started today?

Seth:

Yeah, with Courier, it's super easy. You can go sign up for a free account today if you already have a provider. Great. If not, you can hook up your gmail account. Courier provides a few other out of the box providers that you can get up and running easily with, but it's as simple as signing up in and getting your API key on our side.

Ben:

And the Segment side is pretty much the same experience. If you go to Segment.com, it's possible to create a free workspace and never have to talk to anybody. You can do a whole bunch of stuff for free. Obviously there are some features that are behind the subscription while there, but there's enough to get started with to build the proof of concept.

Ben:

And I think that's probably the best first step. You know, for anybody who's who's used to tinkering, who plays in code, who wants to build something, you can do enough to get started and then grow it from there as as you need.

Noah:

Fantastic. Well, gentlemen, I really appreciate you being on the show today. I've learned a lot. This is a rich integration between two powerhouse tools that are enabling the ease of implementation of notifications, the measurement, the visibility, and the power of notifications, and making it fast and quick to get up and running with two power tools. Really appreciate you both being on the show.

Seth:

Thank you. Know, appreciate it.

Ben:

Thanks.

Noah:

I'm blown away at how powerful the Courier and Segment integration is by bi-directionally hooking up your notification infrastructure and your customer data platform. You can easily get started building smart, relevant notifications for your product or platform. As a reminder, Courier makes it easier for you to deliver a world class notification experience that your customers expect to learn more about their product and get started today

Noah:

check out Courier.com and thanks again for listening.