Nova

Nova helps you craft personalized email messages for the targeted individual at scale.

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Inspiration

People don't read templated emails (i.e., spam). This is why over 3M B2B sales development reps and account executives spend several hours a day personalizing to customers and prospects, to get them to engage. Much of this personalization involves Google searching specific individuals and inserting custom content to garner engagement pass the "is this an email from a person?" test.

Having worked in and led sales teams, we know that 1) personalization WORKS -- driving a 5-10x greater likelihood to move a prospect deeper in the funnel (e.g., to demo/signup), and 2) this process of personalization is very repetitive and time-consuming.

At Nova, we've developed technology to personalize content digitally for salespeople, at scale.

What it does

Nova drives engagement. With Nova, a salesperson drives 3.5-4.5x (our overall measurement from our database is 3.84x response rate for personalized / unpersonalized) the level of engagement from prospects using her existing leads and content.

Nova does this by gathering data on each prospect and using it to customize subject lines, to digitally create paragraphs of individually targeted rapport-building text, and to customize when a message is sent (to maximize engagement).

How I built it

Nova is a SaaS product with a Chrome Extension front end, a cloud-based backend and API, and is used in conjunction with Google Apps mail. As a result of being built on top of Google Apps mail, the Chrome Extension "lives" and operates within the Gmail/Google Apps web experience.

Challenges I ran into

Chrome extensions built on top of Gmail/Google Apps are prolific, so it was very challenging to "play nice" with and coexist properly with the myriad other Gmail Chrome Extensions out there. Additionally, it is difficult to properly process thousands of emails per day for reply and bounce detection. At scale and in real-time, we have to properly assign the replies and bounces to the correct email campaigns that the original messages came from for our users using the contextio webhook APIs.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

  1. Scalable infrastructure
  2. Robust and accurate real-time reply and bounce detection using context.io lite api webhook processing on thousands of messages per day
  3. Real-time UX in a gmail chrome extension that properly coexists with other chrome extensions
  4. Successful rollout to hundreds of customers

What I learned

  1. Technologies: Ruby on rails, chrome extensions, angularJS, postgres SQL
  2. Integrations: Context.io (Specifically webhooks on both the 2.0 and lite APIs), Google Apps, Gmail, Salesforce, Oauth 1.0 & 2.0, Imgix
  3. Technical methodologies: Scalable deployment of web applications, multi-developer collaboration techniques, agile product development for software
  4. Nontechnical: Building a startup from the ground up, promotion, sales, marketing, partnerships, customer support, organizational development, fundraising, strategy

What's next for Nova

Move from beta to successful launch and continue to grow our userbase and implement our strategic roadmap. Immediate next steps: Launch and grow to several hundred active companies that use our product every week.

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