FirstPulse
Turning a white-glove agency service into a self-serve product, with a shared data lake, a signal-driven marketing engine and a partner channel that sells it.
Mission results
- To the first self-serve version
- 2 months
- Replaced a white-glove onboarding process
- Self-serve
- Hand-run marketing scripts
- 0
Where it started.
A marketing agency serving real estate investors offered data and marketing services through a white-glove, high-touch and complicated onboarding process. It worked, but it was expensive to deliver and hard to scale.
The agency already had a robust platform to aggregate, analyze and distribute data to clients. The marketing itself was manual: one person ran a set of hand-written scripts to generate mailers, validate the data and submit it to the mail house.
What we had to work within.
- C-01The existing data platform worked and powered live client marketing, so it had to keep running while we changed it underneath.
- C-02Data was organized in separate per-client spaces, which wouldn't scale to a self-serve product.
- C-03Core marketing operations lived in hand-run scripts that only one person knew how to operate.
Decisions we made.
- 01
One shared data lake instead of per-client silos
We re-architected away from per-client data spaces into a shared property and contact data lake. Every new client builds on the same data instead of starting from scratch.
- 02
Replace the scripts with a marketing engine
Hand-run scripts became a new marketing engine that decides who to market to and when, based on seller signals and timing. Validation and mail-house submission are part of the system, not one person's routine.
- 03
Let partners sell it
We built a partner-driven sales model. Admins set defaults, partners configure every detail of their own clients' marketing plans, and partners can mark up pricing and keep the margin. That gives the agency a sales channel that grows without adding headcount.
What we built.
FirstPulse, a product under its own brand: a fully self-serve version of the agency's white-glove service, offered at a fraction of the cost.
Underneath it, a re-architected data layer built on a shared property and contact data lake, plus a series of improvements to scale the existing data platform.
A new marketing engine driven by seller signals and timing, and partner tooling for configuring client marketing plans, pricing and markups on top of admin-set defaults.
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View full size ↗What changed.
The agency can now offer its data and marketing services to many more clients at a fraction of the cost, without a hands-on onboarding for each one. The first version shipped in two months, and we keep improving the platform as an ongoing product partner.
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