Posts by Alex MacCaw

From time to time we have to make backwards incompatible changes to our APIs. To make sure everything keeps working for our customers we have a date based API versioning system [https://clearbit.com/blog/versioning-apis-internally] which works pretty well. However, this does mean that at any point in time we have a lot of customers using older versions of the API, which in turn means they're not getting the latest and greatest data from us. We've been testing various approaches to persuade peop

An effective way of sourcing new leads for your business is by looking for companies that are similar to your existing customers. Similar both in terms of size, but also market--essentially going after your customer's competitors. Clearbit's Discovery API [https://clearbit.com/discovery] can help you find these leads programatically using our clustering algorithms to search for similar companies. Our most successful outbound campaign to date has been powered by a similar lead list. For example

We use Docker and CoreOS extensively at Clearbit. We have over 70 different internal services running across a cluster of 18 machines on EC2. Every day our servers handle upwards of 1.5 million API calls, and that growth rate is only increasing. All this means being able to scale our infrastructure quickly is incredibly important to the company. We've made significant upfront investments into tools to help us with this and we'd like to share our experiences to help other teams facing similar ch

Whenever someone signs up to Clearbit they kick off a whole series of events ranging from drip campaigns, sales notifications and funnel analytics. I thought it would be fun to dig into what's happening behind the scenes. The signup As soon as someone clicks that signup button [https://clearbit.com/signup] we do an analysis on their registration information and email address to try and decide if it's genuine. We ping MX servers, our own Person API, and also look at the company associated with t

I'm happy to announce we've released a new data attribute for our Company API - technology tags. These tags represent the technology stack and products used by a company. This can be quite handy. We love instantly knowing whether a new signup comes from a business that already leverages cloud technology or not. In addition, it helps us be more targeted with messaging as to our prebuilt integrations (ex. someone uses Salesforce). For example the tech tags for segment.com [https://segment.com] s