In order to succeed at Jetfuel, we knew we'd have to do things 10x as fast as our bigger competitors.
JJ Maxwell, co-founder and CRO of Jetfuel, is building a platform to empower creators by helping them monetize their work through content and advertising.
And given his background as an engineer and data scientist, JJ was keen to arm his team with the right tooling to build best-in-class products and services.
At first, they added contractors to build out critical tools. But he mentions, "the contractors were expensive and didn't give us flexibility to change the tools—unless of course, we added more contracting hours." As a result, every function—from support to creative to trust and safety—felt like they were missing key dashboards and visualizations to do their work.
This is the story of how JJ and his team built internal tools that helped every team bring insights and action into the same place.
The most pressing need for data and action to live side-by-side came from the customer support team.
Our support team was jumping from one tool to another to scrape together the data and then make updates or take action.
JJ knew they needed to customize their internal tooling to reduce the manual steps. So he started researching solutions, and came across a tweet about Retool. He shares, "Retool solved my need so explicitly, so I jumped in and started building dashboards."
He built a support dashboard that pulled together all of the visualizations and workflows the team needed in just a few hours.
Then JJ switched his focus to an advertising campaign management tool.
His MVP took him just 30 minutes to build—which was weeks faster and thousands of dollars cheaper than the cost of contractor tooling or putting 2-3 full-time engineers on it for a sprint.
We would have had to hire 2-3 full-time engineers to build what I did in 30 minutes using Retool.
As JJ explains, the entire Jetfuel team uses Retool daily, from customer support for managing user data and requests, to the creative team for reviewing user ads, and the trust and safety team for approving content.
Let's take a more in-depth look at their customer support use case.
Customer support is contacted when a Jetfuel user reports an error or issue, such as installations not counting for apps the creator is promoting.
The easiest way to handle the error or request is to visualize it with data. Using the Retool chart component, powered by Plot.ly, the customer support rep can see various levels of data, such as:
- Hourly installations
- Content performance
- User data
But seeing the data isn’t where their support role ends—there’s a follow-up question to the data which involves taking action, such as analyzing data or sending a message to a user.
“Retool allows the team to see the data and take actions right in the same place,” JJ explains.
In tradtional BI tools, you can’t take action where you’re viewing the data. By collapsing the time between viewing and acting on data, Retool saves us time and improves the experience for our customers, too.
Plus, the support team is empowered to go investigate things and act on them in some way, which has sped up the entire organization and led to ongoing improvements in the product.
“Retool allows our team to see data and take actions right in the same place.”
In 2020, Jetfuel launched over 100 app versions, many of which required support teams to handle inquiries and deal with customer data.
“Since Retool is so adaptable and easy to modify, we were able to easily keep things up to date in our support system, better serve customers, and continue iterating quickly,” JJ says.
They've been tracking response time metrics since rolling out retool, and have built confidence that Jetfuel is able to provide much faster support using Retool.
What’s more, JJ says that using Retool accelerated and changed the direction of our entire company.
Retool enabled us to scale to millions in revenue and support thousands of creators with a lean engineering team. Every single internal team member is using Retool every day to support our creators and advertisers in one way or another.”
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