How BuildShip increased engineering support speed 2X with Jam
If you could make it happen without engineering power - what would your dream tech stack look like?
Everyone is innovating and experimenting to bring their ideas to life with AI. As markets get tougher with increased competition - the teams who ship fast have the advantage. What determines speed of execution? Usually, engineering and financial resources, among other things. The dream stack will look different from company to company, but the goal is the same: enable your teams to ship ideas fast— without taking a hit on scalability and flexibility. This way, you can continue iterating for your customers, without acquiring technical debt in future versions of your product.
While building the backend of products, including APIs, scheduled jobs, database CRUD operations, etc, teams usually decide to go one of two routes:
1/ No-code automation: third-party tools built for non-technical users can get the job done fast. But, they can cause the team to lose out on the ability to extend and scale, beyond the limitations of the tool.
2/ Internal builds: alternatively, teams can decide to build what they need from the ground up themselves, using code. Building internally has its own challenges with speed to market and engineering costs.
What if there was a happy medium?
Enter BuildShip - an AI-powered visual backend builder that combines the ease of no-code with the power of code. With BuildShip you can create APIs, scheduled jobs, and connect to any AI model, database, or tools to build your backend workflows visually. With hundreds of prebuilt nodes and the ability to generate your own nodes with AI and edit nodes with low code, less technical teams can truly build without limits. The startup is fulfilling the scalable no-code promise and gaining incredible traction, with over 25,000 visual builders adopting this new way to build.
Recently, we chatted with Harini Janakiraman, Co-Founder and CEO at BuildShip, who shared how they fix bugs 2X faster with Jam - even though their no-code users are doing the bulk of the reporting!
The challenge
Figuring out the needs of a new wave of AI builders, and delivering fast
BuildShip’s AI technology is ushering in a new wave of visual builders by enabling non-technical users to literally “code with AI”. It’s a huge unlock, now anyone on the team can build and deploy what they need - easily right from the browser. But, this new possibility also means the developer tool status quo doesn’t serve BuildShip users.
“Our user base is low-code/ no-code, so ideal bug reporting is not something they are super familiar with. Essentially, when a user reported an issue or asked for help, we could lose days going back and forth asking for console logs or reproduction steps.”
For Harini, not acting on customer needs immediately was not an option. She was determined to provide a great experience, from the very beginning. To do so, she needed to streamline and translate communications between BuildShip users, support, and engineering.
“It’s not good enough to have a product that just listens to customer feedback, but doesn't act on it fast. However, to be able to fix a bug report, engineers need a bunch of critical information, so they don't waste time digging through things.”
The solution
Guiding users to Jam’s browser extension for 1-click bug reports
Harini and her team were already using Jam for bug reporting internally. So, extending it to their users was a no-brainer. It worked like a charm, 50 people from their open-source community contributed to their most recent release - and they shipped 100 updates!
“When a customer reports issues or provides feedback, it’s so much easier to ask them to record a Jam. Jam speeds up communication and provides all the details we need to know about what’s going on. This way we can move fast, keep shipping, and keep users happy.”
Today, BuildShip users send Jams for a variety of reasons, beyond flagging issues. Their in-product support box has a unique field for Jam links. So, whether users are requesting help, a new feature, providing feedback, or reporting a bug… with Jam, the engineers on the other side have all the context they need to fix, ship, and build for their users.
The outcome
Technical support engineering 2X faster, engaged community, happy customers
With Jam, BuildShip is shipping fixes 2X faster. They’ve also been able to have more meaningful exchanges with their community of over 25000 visual builders.
“Engagement, product retention, product-led growth - all that feeds into listening to customers, supporting them, and building things for them. Jam helps us do that by facilitating clear and easy feedback loops.”
These positive results came at no cost to their internal systems. With Jam’s Linear integration, Harini and her team have been able to make Jam a seamless part of their product development process.
“The Linear integration makes it super easy, I literally keep creating Linear items and assigning them to our team from Jam. And we get the majority of the bugs fixed the same day seamlessly”
BuildShip’s commitment to its customers’ needs shines through every interaction with its team, brand, and product - setting them apart, as it builds a new way to build and ship.