A startup journey from idea to tons of happy customers | A technical co-founder’s perspective
My journey at Thanx started right after I graduated from Dartmouth with a Computer Science degree. I couldn’t have asked for a better first step, and it all started with a conversation between Dartmouth alums where our CEO Zach Goldstein shared his crazy business idea with me. His sheer passion and the “this just makes sense, why does this not exist yet?” reaction to the concept got me hooked. Shortly after, we were working on the initial prototype — no money, no product, no team — just a crazy idea and excitement for enabling offline businesses to drive more revenue through deeper, data-driven relationships with their customers.
The Early Days
A few months later, our Head of Product and first engineer joined the team. Our scrappy team of four built out the first version of our product, which we launched at Mixt Greens in San Francisco. To fulfill our mission, we chose to tap into the existing way users interact with offline business — through their credit cards — eliminating the hassle faced by traditional loyalty programs which require both consumers and staff to add new steps to the checkout experience. Our main challenges in the infancy of the business were not only accessing our users’ offline spending behavior data, but doing so without inheriting the associated risk of actually storing credit card numbers.
Fast forward to today…
- We are now partnered directly with credit card networks Visa, MasterCard, and American Express. However, in the early days, we did not have those business relationships or integrations built. Our first integration was actually with a credit card processor called First Data. This initial integration was far from ideal as we were only able to partner with merchants processing credit card transactions through First Data (~70% of businesses in the US). However, it was a crucial step for establishing our credibility with the major credit card networks. We launched those integrations in 2015, allowing us to partner with any merchant accepting credit cards.
- Our approach to securely handling credit card data was to not store any sensitive data on our platform at all. We accomplished this through a data security concept called tokenization. We exchange a raw credit card number for a non-sensitive unique identifier provided by our data partners. After the exchange, we use this non-sensitive ID in our platform without having to worry about potentially exposing credit card numbers, since our servers never see this data.
With these two business hurdles solved, our platform built, and the support of elite VCs Sequoia Capital and Icon Venture, we are starting to see what every startup dreams about — continuous and accelerating scale.
Ever-evolving Role
Part of the excitement and allure of a startup is learning and growth. Over the years, I’ve filled many positions. My passion is and always will be building technology. In the early days, my focus was developing product features — building and shipping them as quickly and often as possible. Once we launched and the team grew, out of necessity my responsibilities slowly shifted to management — pulling me away from the tech. I learned so much in that role — from having effective 1:1s with the team, running an agile sprint process, to learning the ins and outs of recruiting top-tier engineering talent. Personally, it was an enlightening experience and, to be honest, a draining one. The more I was in back-to-back meetings and interviews during the day, the more I found myself spending my nights cranking out code.
After a long search, a fantastic day came — we found an exceptional engineering leader. Qaseem Shaikh, most recently VP of Engineering at Zenefits, joined the team a few months ago as our Head of Engineering. He’s taken over all of the things that pulled me away from coding: management, process, recruiting. I don’t have words to express how happy I am to have him here — he brings poise, energy, and skill to everything he does. Since then I dove head-first back into the tech — writing a lot of code, planning out the evolution of our platform, and experimenting with new tech.
Technology
As technical co-founder, technology is always top of mind. I’m especially excited for what’s to come technologically as our platform and team scales. Here is some insight into where we are headed.
Data — Data Science, Machine Learning, and more
Thanx captures data that has never been tapped into at scale across many different business verticals. As larger and more engaged merchants join the platform, we are seeing this data set exponentially grow. We have one of the most sought-after and under-utilized data streams that exist. Take a minute to think about an e-commerce platform like Amazon.com and all the data that they have about their customers. With this data, they are able to cater everything that you see on their website to precisely what you want to look at, based on what you’ve previously purchased and browsed. Their platform provides a unique, personalized experience to each one of their users.
Now, consider an offline business — your local pizza shop or coffee house. These businesses struggle with even understanding who their customers are, let alone being able to create any personalization. This is what Thanx’s mission is — connecting merchants to their customers and enriching their experiences through data.
To date, we have built many tools on this dataset that have already changed the way our merchant partners think about their customers. We have only scratched the surface of what we can do with this data. This quarter alone, we’re setting up a data warehouse, enabling our entire organization through business intelligence tools, and building out a user segmentation engine. Our team is looking forward to building out our data science expertise, applying machine learning and modern data analytics techniques and technology against our unique dataset.
Frontend — Modernizing to React
The landscape of frontend tech moves quickly. In 2011 when we first started to build Thanx, single page applications were just beginning to gain popularity and server-side rendered frontends reigned supreme. Libraries like jQuery, Mootools, and Prototype were popular to create rich user experiences. A couple years after, JS frameworks like AngularJS, Backbone, and Knockout gained traction. These technologies changed the way developers built user experiences — moving the heavy lifting from the server to the client. These days, the frameworks React, Angular 2, and Vue are dominant and server-side rendered front ends are phasing out.
Given the drastic changes in frontend over the past few years, expectations of user experiences continue to increase. Our team is actively migrating our existing frontend codebase and building new experiences in React. We’re excited to leverage React in the many initiatives in the year ahead. We’re rolling out brand new platform tools in a beta experience of our merchant dashboard. As we build out partnerships with ordering and reservation partners, we’ll be creating modern user experiences to power these integrations. As cross-platform app frameworks mature and our existing hybrid branded applications are beginning to show their age, we’re also evaluating React Native to rebuild our consumer experience.
Part of the fun with frontend tech is how fast it changes. We’re excited to leverage the latest technologies to help deliver better experiences to our partners and their customers.
Platform — Monolith to Microservices
The Thanx platform has evolved rather organically over the years, as many platforms do. The platform initially started as a Rails monolith. Since then, we’ve extracted various services out into a transitory platform state — separately deployed applications sharing a primary data store. While these services are deployed separately, many are still tightly coupled due to the shared schema. We’ve addressed some of the complexities of synchronizing our services through deployment automation and a shared Rails engine. However, we have yet to reap the benefits of true microservices — lower cognitive load, elimination of single points of failure, increased platform resilience, ability to independently scale services, etc. Our team is making a concerted effort to fully de-couple our services as our team and the load on our platform scale.
I can definitively say that right now is the most excited I have ever been to be part of the Thanx team.
The Future
A year ago, we were 20 people sitting in one office in San Francisco. I’m currently at the 2018 Sales Kickoff in our new Denver office. Looking around, I see 40 new faces — talented, passionate people that are full of excitement for the year ahead. Our team now spans two geographies, tripling in size from a year earlier.
When I think of all the reasons why Thanx is a special place, the top reason is not our tech, not the funding we’ve raised — but our people and our culture — the Thanx Team. “One Team, One Goal,” the theme of this year’s kickoff, I think describes who we are nicely. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts. With our growing team and a shared sense of urgency, we are in a position to execute. 2018 is going to be quite the year!
We are hiring!
Joining a startup is a life-changing experience where you can make a massive impact and rapidly grow your skills and career. If you’re an engineer that has strong computer science fundamentals, is passionate about building high-quality full-stack software, and excited to joined a like-minded team — then let us know!
