It’s no secret that fast and frequent feedback at the early stages of a startup is critical for reacting to customer demands, product uptake and marketing performance. Putting the systems in place to facilitate this can be time consuming and often have a high noise to signal ratio which means pouring over analytics regularly. We’ve found at Vizamp that having simple notifications in place, triggered by certain events, provides a nice low-fidelity mechanism of consistently having an intuitive reading on how your product is performing and without having to remind yourself to check analytics.
Inspired by the ‘Everything is OK alarm’
I’ve fallen love with IFTTT recently as a means of putting real-time notifications in place with very little setup (among other things it can do). For example notifications sent to a phone when users sign up. Right now at this early stage, we’re getting a notification for every new user. Later when the rate of user sign up increase it will be every ten, then later again hundreds of users, and so on. The basic idea is to strike a balance where you get notified enough to be kept in-the-know, but not so much that you’re being constantly interrupted. Personally I’ve found that notifications at around one per hour hits the mark. If preferred it would be a simple matter to set up notifications at specific times rather than threshold events.
How to set it up
Our servers use Java and so does the example below but of course the same could implemented in other languages. I’ll use the example I mentioned that sends a notification on a new user signing up.
- First set up an IFTTT account here and Create a Recipe
- For the Trigger Channel select Maker then choose Receive a web request
- Give the trigger event a relevant name like user_signup. Take note of the name, which will be used later to call the trigger, then Create.
- For the ‘that’ part of the recipe select IF Notifications then choose Send notification
- Now structure your notification message the way you want it. You can insert up to 3 values from the trigger call you created. For example:
New user signed up - user {{Value1}} signed up to payment
plan {{Value2}}. {{Value3}} total users now signed up.
- Go ahead and Create Action then Create Recipe
- Now go this page (https://maker.ifttt.com) and copy your API key
- On the same page there’s a link (How to Trigger Events) that shows you how to call the Maker trigger API but if you use Java I’ve got a gift for you in the form of the Gist below. It’s a simple class I wrote to call Maker triggers. The unit test below it demonstrates usage. Just make sure to pass in your own API key and event name.
- Finally, install the IFTTT app on your phone (simply referred to as IF in app stores), log in with the same account and run a test to see if the notification gets pushed to you.
There are a multitude of other examples at hackster.io