Building a WhatsApp-based CRM on DigitalOcean

Clientify is a marketing and sales CRM platform focused on Latin American and Spanish-speaking markets. They differentiate themselves by offering WhatsApp, the popular messaging platform, as their main messaging platform. Clientify has used DigitalOcean’s infrastructure services since the beginning, and value the fast performance, simplicity, and cost of DigitalOcean’s products.

Growing up alongside DigitalOcean

Clientify started out as a basic CRM, but in 2018 started to introduce additional marketing features like landing pages, forms, analytics, and automation. They began to work more with marketing agencies and their clients, which led to what Clientify is today—both sales and marketing automation. Crucially, they added an integration with WhatsApp, which is heavily used in Latin America, and made them stand out from other businesses.

Clientify built with DigitalOcean from the start, due to DigitalOcean’s fast SSD hard drives. At first, they had everything on one server, but as they started to grow they separated out their applications. When DigitalOcean launched Managed Databases, Clientify was quick to move their existing databases to the managed versions to get the additional benefits.

“We’ve been growing up with DigitalOcean—we started with 2 people and now have nearly 70 and have 20,000 users across 25 countries. We used DigitalOcean’s SSD-based Droplets to start with, and once DigitalOcean launched Managed Databases we were quick to switch to those as well.” - Juan Pablo Seijo Carretero

Simple solutions meet Clientify’s growing needs

The team values the simplicity of DigitalOcean over other providers, which can make it complex to understand the performance and usage of their servers. They enjoy that it’s easy to create a Droplet on DigitalOcean and add backups in a very simple way, and also use DigitalOcean’s monitoring to see their resource usage.

“As a CTO I value the simplicity of DigitalOcean. We’ve tried other things on AWS, but it’s hard for me to simply create a server, see what’s going on with it, and view the performance as easily as it is with DigitalOcean.”

The performance of DigitalOcean’s servers also supports their application well, and they use Slack notifications to see if there are resource peaks and optimize their setup for better performance. They also enjoy using Managed Databases, which are easier to setup and maintain than the AWS solution they were previously using. Clientify leverages DigitalOcean’s backup and restore capabilities frequently to bring their databases back to a previous version when needed.

“In the beginning I was the only one on the tech team. Using DigitalOcean saved me a lot of time, and by being able to adjust the infrastructure and get insights into the performance we can optimize our own queries.”

Clientify also values DigitalOcean’s global data centers and how easy it has been to switch virtual machines and databases between data centers, and scale up when needed.

“Scaling has been very easy—we started our infrastructure in New York and because of some regulations we had to move to Europe, and it was just a couple of clicks to say we wanted a database in Frankfurt instead of New York. You can also easily make a copy of a Droplet and deploy it or simply resize it.”

While Clientify hasn’t had many issues with DigitalOcean, when they’ve needed to contact the Support team they always find them responsive and helpful. They are also working with DigitalOcean’s solutions engineering team to review their architecture and may look to move towards microservices leveraging DigitalOcean Kubernetes in the future. As they scale their business, Clientify is looking forward to continuing their close relationship with DigitalOcean.