Technical assessment by Midnyte City
informs product development funding decisions for MashrMail

Background

MashrMail is an email creation platform that enables enterprise marketing teams to create emails at speed and scale. The software was originally built for a single key client to improve and accelerate the process for designing and building their emails. The client was able to reduce email creation time by 70%, increase email performance by 200%, and significantly reduce their agency fees.

MashrMail saw the opportunity to expand the software so that other businesses could benefit from it too. The Board brought on Jeni Oye as CEO with the goal of transforming the software into a SaaS product and launching it globally. With the right planning, research, resources, and investment, the development of MashrMail into a SaaS product will propel future growth, creating opportunities for international brand building, new market share, and revenue generation.

Problem

One of the first tasks to realise this vision was to get an understanding of the email creation software in its current form and identify at a high level what investment and development would be required to transform it into a market-ready SaaS product. MashrMail needed assistance and specialist technical skills to make this thorough assessment that would include a review of:

• Platform architecture
  

• Tech stack
  

• Continuous delivery
  

• Infrastructure
  

• Security
  

• Scalability
  

• Team capabilities
  

From the assessment, the following outcomes were required:

1. Showcase and report on the gaps analysis from current to future state
   

2. Review of the current team’s capabilities with a view to scaling the team with the software product
   

3. High-level development roadmap and costs to evolve the platform into a SaaS product.
   

Solution

Through a word-of-mouth recommendation, MashrMail reached out to Midnyte City because they heard about the business’ experience with tackling difficult technology challenges. Midnyte City was invited to conduct the technology review and gap analysis on MashrMail. Midnyte City’s Senior Cloud Engineer, Benny Lo, and Delivery Consultant, Ash Sujathan, worked on the engagement to determine how MashrMail could evolve the current email creation software to a self-service SaaS product.

The duo used the AWS Well-Architected Tool to perform the technical assessment. This involved a review of the software’s architecture, infrastructure, cloud applications, workloads, and programming languages. They also looked at the technology team’s roles, skills, processes, and outsourced services.

To plan accordingly within the constraints of being a startup, the assessment needed recommendations that were pragmatic and reasonable. Midnyte City was able to weigh up priorities, establish an actionable roadmap for the product development, and explain what activities were necessary to make it happen and what could be deferred until a later date.

Results

Cloud architecture revamp
The technical assessment uncovered foundational areas, such as security, reliability, and performance efficiency, in the current tech stack that need to be uplifted to develop and scale MashrMail. There are multiple versions of the code base for each customer, making product maintenance and feature development difficult. The current codebase is a monolith with limited scalability. Modifying the current codebase to support multi-tenant architecture will require substantial time and effort. To avoid this, Midnyte City recommended that MashrLab rewrite their core application as a cloud native application on a more popular and scalable cloud service provider.

Technical capabilities required
Midnyte City identified that different technical expertise would be required to build cloud native applications and manage the infrastructure and backend operations of MashrMail if it were to adopt these recommendations to scale. These are essential for addressing the foundational issues identified above through the AWS Well-Architected Tool.

DevOps and Site Reliability Engineering skills are required to help with logging, monitoring, alerting, and building an automation pipeline. Midnyte City recommended that MashrMail allocate time to uplift current testing practices to include more automated testing. When beginning the product development rollout, standards need to be set for test coverage, automated integration, and end-to-end testing beforeproduction releases.

Product roadmap to future state
The MashrMail roadmap included distinct milestones:

1. Setting up cloud infrastructure for scalability, reliability, efficiency, and security
   

2. Establishing a multi-tenant architecture
   

3. Moving the email creation tool towards a SaaS platform
   

Midnyte City provided high-level estimated time frames, costs, system and team impacts to achieve the roadmap milestones. In order to provide MashrMail with an overview of the operational implications of these strategic decisions. They now have some insight into what is required to evolve the MashrMail product offering, and the funding required to do this successfully and sustainably.