By David Brown

Some people asked me what was the story behind Notif.me. So here it is, I wrote this post to share who we are, what drives us, and where this project is going.

Who are we?

David Brown, French engineer and web developer with 8 years of experience, living in Toulouse. Proud dad of one little boy (who will have a little sister very soon).

I come from the Java world but I shifted to PHP a long time ago, and then to Node.js. I worked the past 6 years as a freelance for clients of all sizes.

Julien Noleau, French web engineer with 8 years of experience, living in Bordeaux.

Big fan of browser extensions, I created a few ones, including a Facebook button "I don't care" used by 1M Facebookers (before being ousted). I worked with David the past 6 years as a freelance.

What drives us?

We are on a mission to help startups improve the quality of their communication with their users.

Sending notifications is a very common need for startups. Yet we’ve seen that integrating and maintaining good quality notifications was a pain point and was very time consuming for all the clients we worked for.

Although some solutions try to help with this problem, what we’ve seen did not convince us, even (especially!) those with a very high price tag.

That’s why a few months ago we tried to launch a SAAS solution tackling this subject, but we were not really fond of cold phoning and emailing… Hence the decision to take an alternative approach: bring value first (open source), and then see if people like what we do.

What do we want to achieve?

Our goal with Notif.me is to create a flock of projects combining together to address four interlaced themes:

• Deliverability — That’s one problem we worked on with notifme-sdk: the library proposes a fallback strategy using an alternative provider if your main one is down. Then using a queue system (like notifme-sdk-queue-rabbitmq) will allow you to retry later without losing requests. The next step is to handle errors happening after the provider accepted the notification with success (if email bounced, try SMS for example).

• Cost management — If you’re unhappy with a provider or find a better deal elsewhere, switch your provider instantly. You may also define a custom provider strategy, for example to use different SMS providers given the recipient’s country, so you can reduce your costs.

• Quality — This is the most subjective point. It involves sending the right notification at the right time. We’ll post a full article dedicated to this point later.

• Time saving — All that without taking forever thanks to a well-written unique standardized documentation and a set of devtools to smooth developers’ work (like Notification Catcher to test notifications in local).

Conclusion

If you what we’re trying to accomplish, you can star our GitHub repository and stay tuned for the next episode :)