Gumlet serves as video infrastructure for more than 6000+ companies. Developers across more than 50 countries rely exclusively on Gumlet to upload, transcode and stream videos and images at scale.
We wrote a post [SaaS we use to build our SaaS] in April 2022 and that received a lot of love from fellow founders. I thought it would be a good idea to write where we stand in 2024.
Essentials ⚡️
Surprisingly our essentials are something we got very right. Never had to change them. Here are the tools we still use today.
Product Management 🍱
Things we have not changed:
Here are the things we had to change
Google Data Studio → Metabase
We used Data Studio as it worked nicely with BigQuery. In the last 2 years, we figured that we needed to build a dashboard not only from BQ but also from ClickHouse (more on this later) and MongoDB (our primary DB). Data studio has no support for these and Metabase is a perfect fit for our workflow.
Segment → RudderStack
Segment just became very costly at our scale. RudderStack fits the bill nicely.
Circle → Discourse
Circle was a big letdown. The SEO was horrible and a ton of features were missing. As soon as we switched to Discourse, things started to improve. Here is a blog which describes the move in depth: https://www.gumlet.com/blog/the-story-of-community-turnaround/
Tech 📟
Things we have not changed:
We however ended up changing a ton of things.
BigQuery → ClickHouse
This change was something we never wanted to do but 2 things changed our minds. Our dataset and queries grew way more than we ever imagined. We store half a trillion rows of data now in ClickHouse.
Second, Google announced that they are increasing the pricing of BigQuery by 25%. This combined with data and query volume prompted us to switch. And boy we are glad that we did! ClickHouse is cheaper, order of magnitude faster, way more feature-rich, and comes with fanatic support (cloud version). We couldn't have asked for more 😄
Gitlab → Github
Gitlab was something that we all enjoyed using. It was also the only SaaS for which we did not pay a single dollar. I suppose that's where it went wrong. They increased per user price from $0 to $29. Github just seemed perfectly fine for us. Never looked back.
Fastly → CloudFront + Cloudflare
Fastly as a CDN has a rock solid infrastructure and their VCL files allowed us to write any configuration we needed. They however decided to leave the India market and their support became non-existent.
At the same time, CloudFront invested a ton in improving their tech and infrastructure and it's now the BEST CDN according to our metrics. We use Cloudflare as well for a backup CDN.
Envkey → Doppler
The migration is still on as of this writing. Envkey was a single-person company and sadly a few days ago they announced they were going to shut it down. We tried Doppler in past so going ahead with the familiar one.
Stitch → HevoData
We used Stitch for more than 3 years. Recently, we gave a try to Hevo and it worked perfectly fine for our use case. The founder of Hevo is a good friend and we are part of the Sequoia Surge program. We flipped this switch a few months ago.
UpDown + StatusPage + PagerDuty → BetterStack
Making 3 tools work together was really a pain. We missed a few alerts and there were a few minor issues here and there. When we found that BetterStack can handle the work of 3 tools in a single panel, we decided to migrate. It's been an awesome ride.
Sales & Marketing 💰
These are the tools which are still in use:
We have removed many tools over the years and have not replaced them.
Salesforce → 🗑️
We were really stupid to run 2 CRMs at the same time. Now everything is in HubSpot.
Zoominfo → Apollo.io
Zoominfo was inaccurate more often than not. We found Apollo to be a good fit.
Calendly → 🗑️
Using HubSpot calendar booking for everyone.
Hunter → 🗑️
Apollo.io replaced this.
Customer Communications 📞
Customer.io is something we still love and is still in use. The other tool Crisp was replaced with the OG Intercom.
We outgrew Crisp as we grew our needs and we needed a more mature platform which can carry in our next phase of customer support growth. Super happy with the decision but this does not mean Crisp is bad. It's still a very good tool for any startup.
Useful Ones 🔆
FreshTeam, Keka and HSBC Banking all are still in use.
That's it!
Hope you find this list helpful and you build something awesome!
Our world is becoming video first and Gumlet is at the center of this revolution. If you are a company that wants to use Gumlet, apply to our startup credits program and if you want to be part of this revolution, please apply for an open position.
