Posts by Alex MacCaw

As more companies turn to freemium and self-service business models, servicing inbound leads is becoming increasingly problematic. Segmenting leads and making sure your company reaches out to qualified customers is an important part of converting them, but with hundreds or thousands of daily inbound leads doing research manually can become a massive time sink. We are building a set of business intelligence APIs [https://clearbit.com/docs] to help research and qualify leads, amongst other use c

If your business has an inbound sales process then you're probably measuring the quality of leads. Knowing how important a lead is helps with prioritizing followups effectively. Proactively reaching out to valuable leads and giving them the white-gloves treatment can also help conversion. At Clearbit we have a system that scores incoming leads based on our data, and sends us an email alert when a high value lead, such as a company that's raised money, signs up. Today I want to release the libr

Heroku [http://heroku.com] is an awesome component to the developer toolchain and lets you get something up and running easily. For me at least, it's transformed how I think about and architect applications. However, there are also a lot of reasons why you might choose an alternative. Maybe it's speed, control, or maybe you just like tinkering. For us, the reason was cost--pure and simple. Clearbit has a huge cluster of machines crawling the web, and Heroku would have been prohibitively expensi

PostgreSQL is notoriously bad at performing well with high offsets, mainly because it needs to do a full table scan and count all the rows up to the offset. This can be a problem is you want to paginate over a full table without holding all the rows in memory. On the surface of it PostgreSQL Cursors [http://www.postgresql.org/docs/9.2/static/plpgsql-cursors.html] may seem like a good solution to this problem--rather than executing a whole query at once a cursor encapsulates the query allowing y

We're excited to announce Mailmatch [https://mailmatch.io], a service for getting social data from your email lists. Simply upload an email list, either by pasting a bunch of emails or by using our Mailchimp integration, and we'll search publicly available information from all over the social web to augment your email marketing list with Facebook handles, Twitter followers and much more. [https://mailmatch.io] As well as the information below, we also offer a CSV download containing many mor