BubbleIQ uses Redash to support sales, save engineering time and report towards investors

CompanyNameNo. of EmployeesUsing Redash SinceData SourcesIndustry
BubbleIQFletcher Richman,
Co-founder & CEO
62017MongoDB LogoMongodDBCustomer Support

About BubbleIQ

BubbleIQ helps companies streamline their support workflow by connecting helpdesk systems (Zendesk, Salesforce) to real-time chat tools (Slack, Drift). This allows companies to provide better support and a high-touch relationship with their customers.

Fletcher Richman serves as the CEO of BubbleIQ, which three technical co-founders started up and has since grown to a team of six.

The challenge: Why BubbleIQ started with Redash

Fletcher got to know Redash in his previous role as a data analyst. When the need emerged at BubbleIQ to do something with their data, he chose Redash.

Their product is simple in terms of what they're measuring and the things that are important. The only time that something stores in the database is when they pass a ticket from Zendesk into Slack or vice-a-versa. It's real strong usage of the product when that's happening. They call that a Bubble and then, within the Bubble, there's the messages that go back and forth as well. Those are the two core KPI's.

We just got to that point where there's a bunch of stuff happening that we needed to measure and I personally like to have things measured. To make good decisions, I need to have graphs and I need to know what's going on.

The solution

They setup Redash and had a few dashboards and graphs that became pretty core to their business.

Redash is being used across their entire organization including employees, customers, stakeholders and even investors. They are looking at various different dashboards and using Redash on a daily basis to track and visualize the most crucial KPIs for the business.

We've 10x the number of Bubbles that we sync per week, since the beginning of the year. And it's just cool to see that number every week. And you can tell: “Oh cool, our usage is going up every single week. We're breaking records, every week and that's something the team can rally around.”

The outcome

Using Redash to save engineering time

BubbleIQ got a feature request from their users: get a notification when a synced Bubble meets some conditions. They could take two weeks of engineering time and build a notification feature, but for a young startup investing two weeks of engineering time for a feature request is a significant investment.

We could build a whole feature, right? Like take two weeks of engineering time and build a notification feature, but I've been able to satisfy a lot of those customers’ requests just with custom Redash dashboards.

Instead, they built out the feature based on a few Redash queries (each query for each type of condition) and the Zapier integration to deliver these notifications. The whole “feature” was done in less in a day.

Being able to implement it using Redash and Zapier not only saved them considerable engineering resources (and made their customers happy), but also allows them to better understand the feature and requirements before implementing it.

Using Redash to support Sales

One of Fletcher’s favorite queries is that he wants to see Bubbles over time for a specific company which he can use it during sales.

Like, this person signed up, they're a week into their free trial, I want to know how much they are using the product.

Because he is going to send a very different email if they’ve created one Bubble or if they’ve created 100.

If they've already synced like 100 tickets, I'm going to say, "Hey, are you ready to sign up for your paid subscription?" If they've only had one, then I'd be like, "Hey, can I help you get things set up?"

Eventually, BubbleIQ will automate this, but it’s great to see how useful Redash can prove in a fast-moving startup environment.

Using Redash for reporting towards Techstars

Part of what helped BubbleIQ get into Techstars, is they had all of these great metrics that they could share with them. They were sharing every two-week update and they were sending them to the program managers at Techstars and they were seeing the same metrics and dashboards.

We also used it during Techstars to report on our weekly goals and metrics. We had a weekly operations review that was two minutes, and we would include a series of Redash graphs to report on growth of our core KPIs. Wow, the usage every week is going up and up and up and up, and we could share those visuals. We constantly got compliments from the Techstars team about being so data-driven and focused.