valmi.io dogfoods its open source reverse-ETL to get notified of new users in Slack.

Acquiring new users is a challenge for any startup. The founders and early engineers are glued to their databases to see new user Signups. Speaking of bigger enterprises, which product leader does not thrill to see customers signing up? We at valmi.io are no exception.

Slack is a pervasive tool in the tech industry. It is used by startups and enterprises alike. We asked ourselves, how can we use Slack to monitor new user signups. We have designed valmi.io Open Source reverse-ETL to solve such use-cases and decided to dogfood it.

All it takes a 5 minute setup to achieve this and it is a three step process. I will demonstrate this in the three videos that follow, one for each step.

First, I configured the Slack integration.

Second, I added our production database as a warehouse. Our database is not overloaded, so I am not worried about any overhead. Alternatively, you can configure for this purpose a separate a read replica database or a warehouse, where user events are tracked.

Finally, I configured a sync to connect the two. Immediately, we start receiving notifications for every sync that is set to run on a schedule.  The sync takes care of pulling only the changed users . In this case, it gets only new users. One interesting aspect of configuring a sync for Notifications such as Slack and Android push notifications is that we can create a template message, which is a jinja-style template, for instance - `Hey {{ recipient_name_var }}, we have a sign up from {{ user_name_var }}. This template is what finally gets set to the destination. For more information, check out docs.

When the sync ran, we received the notifications as shown in the below picture. The Notifications received on Slack and Sync Runs on valmi.io are placed side-by-side.

We are now able to monitor new user signups in real-time in Slack. It might be exciting to see new users signing up, but this is also a great opportunity to reach out to them and find out what they are looking for as a customer.

Although new user signups is just a demonstration to see notifications on Slack,  a variety of interesting new use-cases such as daily sync that can notify us with last day's revenue or  usage or any KPI that the team is interested in, are possible with valmi.io Open Source reverse ETL. Please enable your organisation with reverse-ETL by simply deploying it from github. You can look at a sync live here. Alternatively, you can schedule a sync at cloud.valmi.io. Please contact us if you are looking for any information by joining our community on Slack. We are adding new features to make the platform more robust.