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Launch HN: Dittofeed (YC S22) – open-source customer engagement platform

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Launch HN: Dittofeed (YC S22) – open-source customer engagement platform

#1
Hi HN - we’re Max and Chandler, and we’re building Dittofeed https://dittofeed.com. We make it easy for growth and marketing teams to message their customers across multiple channels. We're an open source alternative to platforms like Iterable, http://customer.io/, Braze, and OneSignal. Here’s a short demo video showing how to run the platform locally, and use it to automate a customer onboarding journey:

https://www.loom.com/share/0f7b67170b3a4205add00c22844ca06f

We created Dittofeed to tackle some commonly felt pains with customer engagement platforms:

First, existing platforms make it difficult to keep imported user data accurate and up to date with your primary user datastore. To solve this, we’re building first-class support for importing data from your data warehouse, for better data consistency.

Second, graphical “journey builders” are fragile, and difficult to debug at scale, so we’re building git-based workflows to check your messaging automation into git as configuration, as well the ability to run Dittofeed locally in development, or in CI with our testing sdk, for improved ease of debugging.

Third, companies in industries like finance and healthcare are often forced to implement their own solutions in-house to avoid sharing sensitive PII with third parties. As an open source platform, companies can now self-host us to keep their PII in their network.

Chandler, having worked in marketing for startups, experienced these challenges first hand. Max, on the other hand, was a senior platform infrastructure engineer at Braze, where he witnessed similar challenges from a technical perspective. Our combined experiences sparked the idea for Dittofeed.

We decided to create an open source, developer-focused customer engagement platform, because the often unspoken truth is that maximizing the effectiveness of these tools requires ongoing engineering involvement.

Dittofeed is built on Clickhouse (OLAP store used for storing user events, performing user segmentation, and aggregations) and Postgres (OLTP store for persisting application configuration, and serving user aggregations for efficient single-row reads).

If you can use the following, we’d love it if you checked us out:

Email support via sendgrid (other channels coming soon).

User data import via Segment integration.

We have a cloud offering, and offer paid support. You can find our pricing on our site https://dittofeed.com/pricing.

How to try Dittofeed out:

Check out our demo site to play around with the app https://demo.dittofeed.com/dashboard

Run the app locally via docker compose (https://docs.dittofeed.com/deployment/self-hosted/docker-com...).

Join our slack and we’ll set you up with cloud hosting (https://join.slack.com/t/dittofeed-community/shared_invite/z...)

We’d love to hear your thoughts, opinions, and experiences with these tools. What’s been your experience working with this kind of tech?

Re: Launch HN: Dittofeed (YC S22) – open-source customer engagement platform

#3

1. Does every user get their own clickhouse instance or is it shared ? 2. For email / sms which integrations do you support ?

It depends! If you're self-hosting you'll get your own clickhouse instance.

Our base cloud hosting currently uses a multi-tenant clickhouse instance, but we also optionally provide a single tenant instance as part of our enterprise cloud offering.

Currently we support sendgrid for email, and SMS is upcoming.

Re: Launch HN: Dittofeed (YC S22) – open-source customer engagement platform

#6
post #4

I don't see the auth for dashboard on github. Am i missing anything ?

We have authorization built into the app, but are using a simple auth proxy, with oidc for authentication. If you want to authenticate your own app, you can use something like ouath2-proxy with an oidc provider, and set the `AUTH_MODE` configuration in our app.

Happy to walk you through it if you join our slack.

Re: Launch HN: Dittofeed (YC S22) – open-source customer engagement platform

#7

Very cool! Love seeing more JavaScript projects in the Marketing/eComm open source community, really neat value proposition for MarTech teams to be insanely productive with high-leverage full-stack JS developers

Thank you! Choosing typescript was intentional on our part, because we want growth / marketing engineers to feel comfortable contributing.
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