February 2023 Summaries

We're Railway, an infrastructure company that provides instant application deployments to developers. As we scaled from nearly 10,000 users to 250K users, our support team had to automate itself to maximize limited bandwidth. We initially consolidated our support channels on the backend and introduced a bot named Percy to manage tasks, point users to existing threads with solutions, create and resolve incidents, and let users self-serve Priority Boarding. As we grew, we added features like direct chat support for teams, a Community Champions Program, and a third-party vendor to index our Discord forums and surface NLP-backed search results to users. We also implemented a support SaaS service called Plain to manage customer relationships and provide a centralized location for support tickets. With these automations, we were able to out-ship companies that require infinite meetings with GPMs and AEs just to talk to customers, reducing the drag on other employees and freeing us up to solve the next business problem. Our goal is now to support two million users with our 2-person team for a 1M-to-1 ratio.

Rox, a programmer, streamer, and builder of products for creators, has built successful projects like ThumbnailTest, which helps video creators test multiple thumbnails, and Clipbot, which generates clips from Twitch streams for TikTok and YouTube Shorts. Rox's workflow involves using a T3 stack (Tailwind, Typescript, tRPC) with Next.js, Postgres, Axiom, Stripe, and Filestack to build his products. He recommends Railway as a useful database service due to its simplicity and ease of use, having previously used Heroku for frontend development but finding it limiting. Rox is now focused on building tools in partnership with creators rather than just for them, aiming to establish himself as someone who can collaborate successfully with influencers and gaming organizations.

Paloma is a digital product studio based in Australia and New Zealand that partners with high-growth startups like Afterpay, ChemCloud, and Taper to build unicorn-scale technology products and brands. The studio designs and builds world-class digital products for diverse clients across Australasia and North America, specializing in building new products and augmenting existing technologies. Paloma's approach to product building is fluid, following a journey of discovery, design, development, and scale, with a focus on getting something in front of customers quickly for feedback. The studio uses a platform called Runn to schedule and staff each engagement, and co-development is a common scenario where they work closely with clients as an extension of their team. Paloma has worked on several high-profile projects, including the Afterpay consumer platform and ChemCloud's digital platform for chemicals procurement. Railway is a key tool in the studio's workflow, providing pipeline management, PR review environments, and rapid iteration capabilities without worrying about servers or infrastructure. Readers can learn more about Paloma's work by checking out their website and following them on social media.

Offen is an open-source analytics solution that is GDPR compliant and opt-in only, using first-party cookies with no ads or third parties involved. To deploy Offen on Railway, click the button above, enter environment variables, and hit deploy, which will automatically provision a PostgreSQL database for you. The required environment variables include OFFEN_DATABASE_CONNECTIONSTRING, OFFEN_DATABASE_DIALECT, PORT, and OFFEN_SECRET. After deployment, visit the /setup endpoint to create an account, log in as the operator, view the dashboard, copy embed codes, and start capturing analytics data.