Topmate is a platform that empowers creators, consultants, and professionals to monetize their expertise by offering tools for personalized pages, one-on-one sessions, webinars, and more. It simplifies service management with features like session scheduling, payment processing, and communication integrations.
With thousands of creators on the platform, many have built large followings, but there was no system to fully leverage this potential. To address this, Topmate's product team aimed to implement a dynamic, multi-step, and multi-channel notification system that could adapt in real-time to user actions.
The backbone of this system is SuprSend's API-first notification infrastructure, which enables Topmate to seamlessly manage complex workflows and deliver personalized notifications across various channels. Currently, Topmate uses this infrastructure to send a wide range of notifications to its users and their audiences.
However, it wasn’t always this way!
In the early days, TopMate utilized an email notification module built on Sendgrid API, and Unlayer (for templates) to communicate with its audience. With their initial notification module, continuous iteration in templates, accessing logs on notification failures, trigger point adjustments, and fallback mechanisms weren’t readily available - and every time, the tech team would be involved.
When the need arose to streamline the platform and help creators leverage their subscriber base, the Topmate team identified three key areas:
Deciding between build vs buy, and moving forward with integrating SuprSend, Dinesh Singh, co-founder & CTO at Topmate mentions, “Engineering bandwidth was a major concern. Building the entire notification infrastructure from scratch would have taken massive efforts and diverted resources from our core product development. We needed a solution that offered flexibility, scalability, and faster iteration.”
Previously, Topmate relied on writing business logic within their code to send multi-step notifications such as reminders, and onboarding sequences. For instance, creating a ‘Submit Testimonial’ sequence required development for each reminder, checking certain conditions, branching, testing and releasing, demanding significant engineering resources. While manageable for a single use case, this approach quickly became unsustainable as the number of use cases grew, overburdening the engineering team.
This approach also hindered quick iteration. The product team had to rely on developers to implement any changes. This process became a bottleneck, significantly slowing time-to-launch and a number of experiments.
Another issue Topmate faced was the lack of observability in their notifications. Some notifications failed, and without logs or monitoring tools, it was difficult to perform root cause analysis, leading to a poor user experience. This is when the team decided to partner with SuprSend, a specialized tool building in notification infrastructure with an API-first approach.
By integrating SuprSend’s workflow APIs, Topmate offloaded the complexity of notifications on SuprSend workflows. Now, they simply send events to SuprSend, where everything from template management to multi-step logic to observability and logging is handled. This eliminated the need for engineering involvement from Topmate’s side.
Additionally, with SuprSend, Topmate introduced powerful functions, such as batching that groups similar notifications, and time-zone that sends notifications in user’s respective timezones. This provided a better user experience, helping Topmate send fewer and more personalized notifications.
Topmate’s creators frequently engaged in 1:1 sessions with their audience but faced challenges in maintaining regular engagement as they couldn’t leverage their existing customer lists for resale or retargeting. Building a solution that allows Topmate’s creators to run engagement campaigns from within Topmate’s platform was considered, but it presented several significant challenges:
Topmate evaluated several solutions before selecting SuprSend. The primary reasons for choosing SuprSend were:
SuprSend’s multi-tenant system allows each Topmate customer to customize their notifications with preset brand characteristics. The integration steps included:
They provide an omni-channel notifications experience to their users, with Whatsapp being their secondary communication channel. The setup is very similar to the above-mentioned email campaigns, which are run on SuprSend.
The above two (email and WhatsApp) were a notification campaign with only 1 notification being created and triggered simultaneously. Topmate’s users needed more than that.
Topmate introduced ‘Funnels,’ powered by SuprSend, allowing users to create automated multi-step notification journeys using pre-made templates and workflows.
The Need for Funnels?
Topmate’s customers sought more sophisticated ways to engage their audience, especially to upsell premium services, offer discounts, or share resources. The existing system required manual intervention for each engagement, which was time-consuming and inefficient. A funnel system would automate this process, saving time and ensuring consistent messaging.
Benefits of the Funnels:
Topmate’s engineering team designed the workflow and templates necessary for the funnel. Here’s an example of the workflow:
Topmate allows its users to design their email templates directly on the Topmate dashboard. Users can customize their templates to match their brand's design and requirements. These templates are created using a user-friendly template editor on Topmate’s platform.
Monitoring and Logs:
Topmate’s team has complete visibility into the process through the Logs section in SuprSend, ensuring they can monitor and troubleshoot as needed. However, this visibility extends beyond Topmate’s internal team.
Dinesh Singh states, “One of the key issues with our old system was the lack of observability. We had difficulty tracking failed notifications and performing root-cause analysis. SuprSend provided detailed logs and monitoring, which greatly improved our ability to troubleshoot and enhance user experience.”
Additionally, Topmate leverages notification data sync in parquet files to their data warehouse, providing its creators with detailed analytics on their marketing campaigns directly on Topmate’s dashboards. This includes metrics such as view rates, engagement rates, drop-off rates, and more. These insights empower creators to optimize their campaigns and make data-driven decisions. This allowed them to skip the development of a webhook and database infrastructure at their end.
With these additions to their platform, their creator could quickly resell when they wanted. One of Topmate's creators earned in six-figures due to these implementations, effectively increasing their NPS score and customer satisfaction.
