Company

A few months ago we set out to redesign Clearbit's signup form [https://clearbit.com/signup] from the ground up. Self-service is a key aspect of our business, so we wanted to make the registration process as painless as possible. We also wanted to use this as an opportunity to show off our own data and automatically pre-fill fields wherever we could. Step one, the basics It is universally acknowledged that the less fields in a form, the higher the conversion rate. So we decided to start out wit

We recently crossed two big milestones, 1000 customers and 100,000 daily active users across our products. While this is a significant moment for us, I have to admit to feeling a touch of nostalgia as I remember jumping for joy when our first customer signed up a little over two years ago. At the time the company consisted of me working out of my bedroom. When we added a sales team they made calls from the laundry room. Fast forward to today, and we have a team of 17 working out of a beautiful

Problem Analytics are hard to get right – especially for complex business models (like API-first SaaS). Building a flexible analytics stack is typically a challenging, non-trivial project. Everyone wants accurate, comprehensive data that can be easily consumed by teams across the company, but getting there hasn’t always been easy. This often requires a team of data engineers to build, test, and monitor a custom ETL (extract, transform, load) pipeline that cleans, aggregates, and loads data from

Yesterday we had a bad outage. From 22:25 to 22:58 most of our servers were down and serving 503 errors. As is common with these scenarios the cause was cascading failures which we go into detail below. Every day we serve millions of API requests, and thousands of businesses depend on us - we deeply regret downtime of any nature, but it's also an opportunity for us to learn and make sure it doesn't happen in the future. Below is yesterday's postmortem. We've taken several steps to remove singl

Building on top of Gmail is hard. Like really hard. Google doesn't provide any official JavaScript APIs, and indeed seems pretty laissez faire about people building on top of the platform in general. Then there's the matter of the generated source code. Just go and click 'View Source' on Gmail. If your browser doesn't end up crashing, you'll be unpleasantly surprised with a spaghetti of generated markdown The rewards for integrating with Gmail though, are large. It's where a lot of people spen