We’ve got customers using DoneDone in some pretty creative ways. One team uses it to dispatch customer issues for field technicians at an energy leasing business. Other teams, oddly enough, use it’s unusually clean interface to manage warehouse inventory (ponder that). Other teams? Well, they use it as an issue tracker for software development.

The rebuild

When DoneDone was originally built in mid-2009, it was primarily to service our burgeoning consulting business at We Are Mammoth. After offering it to the public and gaining a bit of traction, we realized, oh shit, we should’ve built this differently. In early 2011, we finally pinched our noses and leaped into the depths of an overhaul. Bottom to top. One of the most significant improvements we made was also one of the simplest. We killed our hand crafted SMTP tech, and let Postmark take care of DoneDone’s transactional emails.

Incoming email, and the art of not signing in.

Teams use DoneDone to create tasks, assign them to coworkers, who in turn discuss, implement, and finally verify that they’re completed. At each step in that workflow, email plays a crucial role in keeping folks updated. More importantly, email enables users to interact with the application without ever signing in to DoneDone. We’ve worked really hard in the new DoneDone to ensure that email clients are usable extensions of the application.

Most primary features of DoneDone, such as creating issues, commenting, and sharing files, can be accomplished via email. If DoneDone in a browser is the mothership, emails are it’s satellites. Postmarks newest addition, incoming email, makes it all possible in a speedy, dependable manner. All via crystal clear API.

The problems with the “old way”

In the old DoneDone, we hand coded everything. With the exception of our recurring billing system (which was Zuora, but is now CheddarGetter), we used no 3rd party services.

That means we had basic SMTP functionality for this integral component of DoneDone. Not a single one of us are any good with SMTP. It did the trick, but barely. Our emails had no metrics, no spam reports, no dependable delivery approach, and certainly no dedicated hardware. Oh, and users couldn’t share files via email.

The perks of Postmark

We’re not only getting technology off our hands, but we’re getting rid of specialization and server overhead. To be honest, we’re not interested in being transactional email heroes. These guys are. And we’re confident that delivery rates, concurrency, security, and spam regulations are all in good hands.

Thankfully for us Postmark is a blackbox which works. It’s apparent that the guys at Wildbit really care enough to scratch an itch the entire SaaS world needs help with, and they’ve nailed it. There’s only a couple of competitors out there. There are no peers.

It sounds funny to say it, but none of the thousands of users we have knows Postmark exists. And that’s about as good a compliment as you can give a technology these days.

← Inbound

Written by Craig Bryant,
cofounder of We Are Mammoth, the makers of the DoneDone issue tracker.