SpotHero: Innovation through Rapid Prototyping

With Replit Teams, the SpotHero marketing team has developed internal tools, data integrations, and prototypes to seamlessly and cost-effectively integrate disparate departmental systems.

“Rapid prototypes that don’t tie up product and engineering teams with unproven methods are vital for innovation. Replit enables us to cycle quickly, helping us determine which projects are worthy of greater effort from our limited internal teams and which should continue to run departmentally.”

SpotHero overview

SpotHero is the leading parking reservation marketplace that helps drivers find, compare, and reserve parking across 300+ cities in the U.S. and Canada. Since being founded in 2011, SpotHero has helped drivers park over 75 million cars.

Challenges

The SpotHero marketing organization faces some challenges in their daily workflows:

• Fragmented marketing technology systems - The marketing technology they rely on is critical to their workflows. However, each platform has its own nuances and specific data requirements, which makes complex campaigns difficult without server-side processing.
• Limited engineering capacity - Engineering is focused on company-critical product priorities. Using engineering capacity to run high-risk prototypes isn’t always the most efficient use of resources.

These challenges are common in many marketing organizations, and they often result in marketing teams wasting hours on laborious manual tasks or causing them to allocate excessive OpEx funds for third-party software or service solutions where relatively simple technology solutions will suffice.

“Replit solutions enable our teams to get up to speed quickly. Junior Engineers can focus on functional code much faster because Replit removes up-front environmental barriers.”

Chris Stevens, SpotHero's Chief Marketing Officer, wanted to empower his team to build their own internal tools and prototypes, unblocking their work without burdening primary product and engineering teams with prototypes and/or departmental solutions.

The SpotHero marketing team builds two main types of projects:

• Internal tools
• Greenfield applications

Internal tools

Digital marketing requires teams to accurately capture, assess, and act on data. This is important, but difficult. The average enterprise uses 120 different marketing tools, each one with different schema and requirements. Consequently, many marketing teams spend hours uploading and downloading spreadsheets of data. Using Replit, SpotHero can build custom Python and/or JavaScript to connect to platform APIs, transform data, and send it to the proper place at a relatively low expense. With Replit deployments, SpotHero can automate the process, scheduling deployments to execute on a recurring basis:

“Many marketing departments have more software packages than staff members to deal with a myriad of tasks, including nuanced campaigns, analytics, competitive intelligence, and other challenges. This leads to high OpEx, complexity, and manual effort. Often, low levels of integration can solve many core challenges at reasonable expense in a way that can pave a long-term plan that both increases productivity and reduces expense.”

Replit offers flexible hosting for any type of project, including Autoscale, Static, and Reserved VM.

While no-code tools or pipelines are an option, they have significant limits and costs scale rapidly.

“There are times that no-code solutions work well for departmental efforts. In others, especially as complexity grows, managers would be wise to ask the question of whether no-code solutions are maximally productive or if they’re shifting energy from writing clean, readable, and maintainable code to guessing how the no-code solutions interact with other code.”

Greenfield applications

The SpotHero marketing team often has ideas for applications that could drive marketing return on investment (ROI), help scale certain operations, or deliver valuable insights for the business. Using Replit AI and deployments, the team was able to quickly prototype several business concepts without taxing internal engineering and product resources.

For example, the team developed an application to ingest and transform data from multiple sources, store the transformed data in an embedded Replit Postgres database, and then deliver business insights and communications APIs. Powered by Neon, the database scales as needed.

The impact of using Replit

The SpotHero marketing team built internal tools to help integrate, automate, and scale business processes that otherwise consume unacceptable hours of labor and/or perpetual OpEx (software) license expense. “Rapid prototyping capability shifts the dialog from ‘Should we?’ to ‘How soon can we know?”

Now, the marketing team feels empowered to build and take risks with a “fail-fast culture.” This doesn’t necessarily bypass other teams. In fact, SpotHero sees the need to collaborate more with other teams to keep the organization aligned.

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