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Show HN: Laudspeaker – open-source customer journey automation (github.com)

148 points by abe94 ↗ HN
Hey HN, excited to share our open source tool with the community. We wanted to build an open source omnichannel tool where you can design customer journeys with a drag and drop editor.

You can use our tool for example to design an onboarding flow so that users who sign up to your site can receive a series of predetermined emails and sms. Give it a spin and let us know how we can improve it. We also made it so you can self host.

45 comments

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thebigm101
Ex adobe eng here worked on our similar project - looks great always thought there should be an open source alternative as marketing tech becomes more complex.

The hard thing here is making something that scales with millions of messages, have you thought through how you may handle that?

mcharawi
Hey, cofounder of Laudspeaker here. At a high level, there are two main problems to solve for when it comes to scaling this type of system. One is the ability of your infrastructure to handle resource intensive customer requests (sending 10 million emails) that are instantiated at arbitrary unpredictable times—this sort of work is usually best handled using job queues and job processing threads that are horizontally scalable. The second is the channel specific failure modes that are common at higher message sending volumes, for example IP blacklisting by spam filters for email, or sending the same notifications repeatedly when dealing with mobile push. We’ve set up our architecture to tackle the first problem and are currently performing stress testing to find and fix any bottlenecks there; with respect to the second type of problem, we are actively experimenting with ways to mitigate these failure modes as our product matures.
vmarchaud
Hey, i'm interested in the kind of problems you have run against in those cases if you don't mind sharing them ? My email is in my bio
mpowell94
What warehouses do yall support?
abe94
We have a databricks integration in staging right now, with plans for all the major ones. What use-cases do you have in mind for them?
mpowell94
We have additional data outside our core user system and wed like to condition messaging based on that. That warehouse also contains the core user data, but on a lag. Could we condition messages on prod data + warehouse data or would we have to condition everything on one or the other?
rodolphoarruda
Hello GitHub. I'm willing to pay for a service that deploys a demo instance of the repo. You can craft a nice little button named "Demo" and when I click it, you'd send me back an URL and credentials to the app itself. Last, but not least, please share a cut of the deployment fee with the repo core maintainers. Thanks
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addandsubtract
Unfortunately, the app code is only half the battle. GitHub can't know how to delpoy your app out of thin air (maybe thin AIr™ soon, but I digress). Heroku introduced a neat "Deploy with Heroku" button a few years back, and Docker has made deployments more streamlined, but both solutions still need instructions on what and how to deploy.

As for this project, they have "1-Click Deploy to Render" on their "coming soon" list.

abe94
Yes we have a 1 click render deploy!
mukundt
Looking forward to the databricks integration - congrats guys!
revskill
Email messaging/marketing these days are almost spam, i'm not sure if it's useful enough.
jmacd
I've been so frustrated looking at the commercial options in this space. The one I like the most (customer.io) has gone completely "Call Us". For some reason I just balk at and freeze up. I never end up filling out those forms, even though it's never a high bar to get me to input my email address on a site I find even remotely interesting.

I made a list of "things that need a high quality open source version" and this was at the top of the list. I've looked and looked at some of the more established options, but they seem like too much software for what I want.

I'm looking forward to trying it out when we launch our cloud version soon.

abe94
Great to hear that - we agree that customer io has the nicest UX in the space, the others are way more focused on enterprise customers and hard to try out.

Feel free to join our slack group when you launch and we'd be happy to help set you up!

superphil0
Just too bad react native support is lacking many features. We Probably will have to switch because of this.
sudonim
React native is a newer SDK for us and should be rapidly improving. I want to dig in here and see if we can fix this. Dropped you an email.
braden-lk
We use Customer.io! It's quite nice, but I wince every time the monthly bill comes in. It's about 50% of our total expenses, and we pay for more than a dozen other services. I wish it was priced on some combination of users + usage, rather than just users. We have an enormous mailing list, but only interact with a small portion of it 95% of the time.

That said, the segmentation and automation flows are nice.

sudonim
Hey Braden, I’m Colin, CEO at Customer.io. I’m glad you’re getting value out of our segmentation & automation!

Your use-case: enormous mailing list, but only a small % you consider valuable is one where our pricing actually ends up being competitive with monkey themed newsletter tools but you get way more.

Pricing is definitely as much art as science, and over ~$1000 a month we can consider what’s unique about your business in your plan and do something custom.

Aspirationally, we want renewing customer.io to feel like it’s your easiest decision every month. Feel free to email me —- colin [at] customer.io if you want to connect about your use of the product.

sudonim
Hey, I’m Colin, CEO of Customer.io. We’ve always had a trial w/ our self-service experience. We deprioritized it (and unfortunately made it harder to find) as we built our sales experience. We’re working to make Customer.io a great tool for you to use on day one of your company, not something that gets added at Series B.

Looks like you decided not to raise money for Tier. The bootstrapper program gives you access to Customer.io for a year for free - https://customer.io/startup-program/bootstrapped/.

I hope you give it another look!

jmacd
Hey, thanks for sharing the bootstrapper link. I'll check it out.

If you are interested in offering plans for any segment or channel, as well as custom pricing configurations for larger accounts, then I think could be useful for you. My email is Jevon at tier.run if you'd like to connect.

ad404b8a372f2b9
Looks like a really cool tool, I've been doing onboarding email flows manually like a chump, didn't know customer journey automation was a thing.

With regards to your hosted solution, I couldn't find a privacy page on your website. My two main questions would be: Where are your servers hosted and what happens to my customers' data when I integrate with your service?

abe94
Hey you're right we need to add a privacy page! At the moment our cloud option is hosted on aws. We are working on encryption at rest, (you can off course self host if this is an issue). We store customer data in a mongo instance. What would you like to see, are you looking for something in particular?
feydaykyn
In which country are the datacenters?
abe94
US, at the moment. Are you looking for an eu option?
feydaykyn
I'm not looking at the moment, but for anything privacy related knowing the jurisdiction is key, especially when the GDPR is so much more advanced than anything else. Thanks!
abe94
This makes sense thanks!
bakoo
Having an EU option removes a fair bit of red tape for European customers.
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arvt
Most of these tools support a std set of channels (emails/texts). I think you could reach a much wider audience if people could write plug ins for their own channels
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abe94
This is a good idea, we will add more a public roadmap to our project soon!
mpowell94
push notifications are a big one for us
safeextension
Push is big for us too and likely for many developers
lukasfischer
Out of curiosity: What do you differently than Mautic?
abe94
Hey thats a great question.

I think first of all its good for there to be a few open source projects and options out there, a vibrant ecosystem provides more choices!

Mautic is a solid project thats been around for a while, and has many many features. Our focus is much more narrowly on customer journeys, afaik mautic has added that more recently but it wasn't the core focus.

Beyond that, we want to be easy to self host; we're focusing more on integrations with customer / product data - we've started off with posthog but plan to integrate with segment, Rudderstack, mixpanel etc, as well as databases and warehouses. And "journey testing" is important to us.

At previous companies we've worked at we've consistently seen that marketers/ pms / engineers sort of test emails, sms in production. Issues are caught after the fact, and the big commercial players don't provide too much tooling here. It would be really cool if we could simulate what would happen if specific events are sent, on specific dates, and see what messages those users would receive, we are building a set of features to help this too.

nrjames
I would love to play with the self-hosted version of this. However, being at a company that sends ~ 5 billion messages (across channels) to opted-in existing customers each year, your pricing is far more expensive than Salesforce, Braze, or other commercial competitors. It's enough out of the ballpark that I wouldn't even bother to spin up an instance and play with it.
mcharawi
Hey, cofounder of laudspeaker here. If you want to try it out, you can deploy to render without having to really do any heavy lifting. We are just getting started with respect to the business model so we’re open to feedback on pricing. Email me at mahamad at laudspeaker dot com and we can chat!
oipoloi
Tried out the editor - what do you think differentiates it from others? You mention that customer io 's is nice, why do you prefer that to say braze?
chevman
This is great! Really nice work.

Check out Adobe's similar product if you want to consider additional features for your roadmap:

https://experienceleague.adobe.com/docs/journey-optimizer/us...

Pricing wise you're going to need to figure out a different model long term is my guess, especially considering this is a layer on top of the message channels (eg email, SMS, push) that require their own setup/contract/pricing. Your per message pricing is orders of magnitude more expensive than the downstream channel message pricing most folks pushing any kind of volume are paying.

Good luck with this - following your github repo now, excited to see where you guys take this in the future. Definitely a need for more open source in this space.

abe94
Thanks - we appreciate the nice words, and will continue to experiment with the pricing!
ravagat
Super interesting, I've been slowly looking into this type of things having recently opened up a non-tech business. May have to give this a try.