Redwood is the goto for startups, but in a modern stack, shouldn’t marketing and support be the first building block for a successful business?
I’ve been hunting for affordable ways to evolve my businesses into modern stacks in an affordable way. Cloud native services have incremental costs for compute, power, bandwidth, storage, etc, but somehow vendors for the ad world acronyms want to charge a fortune per managed contact. This creates a scalability issue for non e-commerce storefront startups as there are no affordable options available for a user base of 100k-1m users, which is a small dataset and a manageable contact list, but would totally bankrupt most startups without venture capital.
I looked in discord and found a number of mentions where devs are building their own CRMs on redwood, but i don’t know if anyone has open sourced their project.
A CRM is your customer/sales data.
A CDP is the pipeline of your web traffic along with your customer data into enrichment and cleanup processes for landing in your data warehouse.
A CEP is an engagement platform that allows you to manage subscription lists, potentially also via SMS, web notifications, app notifications, etc.
A CC is a call center service that matches up contact records from disparate origins into a incoming and outgoing communication channels and histories. Usually this is paired with a CRM.
Drip marketing is automation sent based on triggers from behaviors captured.
Thankfully, most barebones contact APIs are super affordable. It’s these extra services that are obscenely priced. What are you using to build segments, capture leads, create engagement automations, capture feedback, manage support requests, scale out your sales teams, and activate your user data for effective marketing? Here’s what I’m integrating so far:
Snowplow CDP is open source and doesn’t charge per contact. Rudderstack appears to charge per contact.
AWS SES and SendGrid are affordable options for sending emails, but SendGrid wants to charge per contact for list management.
Supabase is auth + live data streaming in a trusted RDBMS, so I’m considering this. I like Auth0 as an affordable auth service. Firebase in GCP, Azure, and AWS also have Authentication and RBAC services. Magic Link seems a little spendy, but has an excellent feature set.
Amazon has a call center cloud that uses AI to do record matching. It looks affordably priced.
Ideally a nice lead gen and drip campaign support ticket system exists in open source land that doesn’t involve me having to run a php server. I’ve been digging through open source projects looking for a good one, but even better would be one written in javascript.
Please, Gods of Redwood, let this be a consideration for funding in a future side project or something similar to what Supabase have done with their acquisitions of open source projects that build into their core feature set. Surely you guys know how crippling it is to not have access to the enterprise scale business tools required to get success in a connected world.