Discover how Ambassify, a leading social media distribution platform, leverages Herokus flexible and scalable infrastructure to enable employee advocacy programs and drive customer success. Explore their journey of rapid deployment, technical evolution, and seamless integration with Heroku's ecosystem, ensuring consistent brand messaging and maximizing the potential of brand ambassadors. Learn more about Ambassify's powerful solution on Heroku and their mission to amplify brands through employee engagement.
In today's digital age, companies recognize the immense value of employee advocacy in amplifying their brand messaging and driving customer success. The power of word-of-mouth marketing, facilitated by passionate employees acting as brand ambassadors, can significantly enhance a brand's online presence and influence potential customers. However, many organizations struggle to effectively organize and manage employee advocacy programs, missing out on the immense potential of this valuable resource. Enter Ambassify, a pioneering social media distribution platform focused on empowering employee advocacy and engagement.
Ambassify provides a white-labeled, Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solution that enables companies to build and nurture internal communities of brand ambassadors. These communities serve as platforms where employees can easily share information about products, services, campaigns, recruitment efforts, and more through social media posts and videos. By offering sample copy and pre-approved messaging, Ambassify ensures consistent brand representation, particularly crucial for regulated industries. Moreover, the platform extends beyond advocacy, allowing companies to run polls, solicit feedback and ideas, and engage employees in various initiatives, including social responsibility projects.
Getting an MVP to market quickly is vital for startups, and Ambassify's journey with Heroku showcases the platform's effectiveness. Founded in 2011, the company initially started with a standard hosted solution but swiftly transitioned to Heroku's Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS). With only one technical founder, Heroku's ease of deployment allowed the team to focus on building a great product rather than managing servers. This decision eliminated the need for a dedicated DevOps engineer, enabling the lean team to allocate more time and resources to feature development.
Wim Mostmans, Co-Founder & CTO of Ambassify, attests to Heroku's benefits, stating, "With Heroku, there is not much to manage. We don't have a DevOps person, and it's all managed by our small team of developers." The flexibility and simplicity of Heroku's platform facilitated Ambassify's pivot from its initial focus on testimonial videos to employee advocacy through social media. As the company evolved both in terms of business and technology, Heroku's seamless integration and easy deployment remained a constant, adapting effortlessly to Ambassify's changing needs.
Ambassify's technical evolution paralleled its business transformation. Initially, the platform was built as a single PHP service running on one Heroku Dyno. However, as Ambassify expanded its customer base and sought to scale specific parts of its infrastructure, the engineering team began breaking down the monolithic structure into microservices. This approach allowed them to tailor their infrastructure to accommodate larger customers' requirements, such as an image resizing service that demanded significant compute resources.
To provide a branded experience for customers, Ambassify incorporated a custom domain name, requiring a static IP address. To meet this need, specific components of their service were moved to Amazon Web Services (AWS), resulting in a hybrid architecture with 20% of the platform running on AWS and the remaining 80% on Heroku. Throughout this technical evolution, Heroku's ecosystem proved invaluable in providing plug-and-play tools and services.
Heroku's ecosystem of Add-ons offered Ambassify convenient solutions when required. Utilizing New Relic APM, the team seamlessly integrated fully managed third-party tools into their platform. Additionally, the Heroku Buildpacks, contributed by the community, allowed Ambassify to add specific libraries effortlessly. For instance, the FFmpeg buildpack enabled the implementation of a thumbnail creation service, eliminating the need to migrate to AWS.
Wim Mostmans highlights the significance of Heroku's buildpacks, saying, "One of the cool things we leveraged on Heroku were the buildpacks, which gave us the freedom of adding very specific libraries to our infrastructure." This flexibility extended beyond the Heroku ecosystem, enabling Ambassify to incorporate external services such as Cloudflare's CDN for improved performance and Loggly for centralized logging.
As Ambassify's customer base expanded and the need for seamless communication between services grew, the company transitioned to Heroku Enterprise. By leveraging Heroku Private Spaces, Ambassify mitigated network latency and enhanced overall performance. Furthermore, Heroku's Private Space provided increased privacy and security, ensuring the safety of data shared between services—a vital consideration for Ambassify's clientele, which primarily consists of banks and insurance companies.
Ambassify's success story on Heroku exemplifies the platform's capability to support businesses of all sizes. Catering to some of Europe's largest enterprises, Ambassify's customers operate multiple communities across various countries. Through the Ambassify platform, employees have reached an astounding 70 million people via social shares in 2022 alone, underscoring the significant impact of employee advocacy on brand visibility and customer engagement.
With Heroku's flexibility, scalability, and user-friendly tools, Ambassify continues to propel its mission of amplifying brands through employee engagement. Wim Mostmans affirms the role of Heroku in Ambassify's journey, stating, "With the option to combine multiple buildpacks on Heroku, it's possible to compose any flavor of server needed to run your solution."
Ambassify's infrastructure on Heroku relies on Node.js and utilizes Heroku Private Spaces to host their microservices. Leveraging Heroku Add-ons like New Relic APM, Ambassify gains valuable insights into their platform's performance. Additionally, the FFmpeg buildpack ensures seamless thumbnail creation, while a custom version of the nginx buildpack acts as a proxy, serving content from various servers. Worker dynos handle email delivery, scheduled sharing, and other crucial queue-based tasks. Outside of the Heroku ecosystem, Ambassify integrates with Cloudflare CDN, Loggly for logging, Twilio for notifications, RedisLabs for caching, and various AWS services.
Ambassify's partnership with Heroku has proven instrumental in their journey towards revolutionizing employee advocacy and driving customer success. By harnessing the power of brand ambassadors, Ambassify empowers companies to extend their reach, strengthen their online presence, and foster authentic connections with their target audience. Explore the Ambassify platform on Heroku today and discover the transformative impact of employee advocacy in the digital landscape.
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