Leadinfo Saves 30% on IT Costs, Improves Developer Efficiency by 50% Using AWS

Leadinfo is a Netherlands-based scale-up that helps B2B customers—from sports organizations, to digital marketing agencies, to heavy industry businesses in steel and packaging—target sales prospects by analyzing information about website visitors. It saw its business grow quickly after the COVID-19 pandemic put a stop to many face-to-face sales calls. By migrating its customer data from multiple databases on AWS to Amazon Aurora, Leadinfo reduced its monthly IT costs by 30 percent while improving developer efficiency by 50 percent. This has helped it to quickly roll out new features for customers and build a foundation for continued business growth.

Netherlands-based Leadinfo built its software as a service (SaaS) offering to answer an important question for B2B salespeople: Who’s visiting my company’s website to learn more about what we offer? Leadinfo says its goal is to help salespeople discover information to help them “transform anonymous website visitors to customers.”

That ability became more important than ever with the arrival of the COVID-19 pandemic, which stopped most face-to-face sales calls in many parts of the world. And it led to explosive growth in Leadinfo’s business.

Founded in 2017, Leadinfo built its IT infrastructure on Amazon Web Services (AWS) from the beginning. But as the company grew ever faster, Leadinfo needed to make sure its technology kept up with its ambitions. So it worked with the AWS team to identify ways to keep its IT efficient. One strategy they agreed on was to consolidate databases, which would help to better manage a rapidly expanding customer base, fast-rising IT costs, and growing demands on the company’s developers.

By migrating its 4 existing databases into a single database—Amazon Aurora, a relational database built for the cloud—the company reduced its monthly IT costs by 30 percent, improved developer efficiency by 50 percent, and halved the amount of time required to onboard new developers. This has helped Leadinfo to speed up its rollout of new service features, allowing customers to generate sales leads faster and more easily.

Just 3 years after it was founded, Leadinfo was growing rapidly and realized that it needed an IT update. The company met with a team of AWS database specialists, solutions architects, and other experts to develop a new data approach for the company.

Using the AWS Working Backwards process, the teams assessed Leadinfo’s needs and goals through a series of workshops, exercises, and other discussions. “We looked at our ideal situation,” says Quirijn Kleppe, head of product and growth at Leadinfo. “We looked at which key performance indicators we set for ourselves and how easy it should be to develop a new feature. And then we started thinking, ‘OK, what do we need in order to get there?’ It became pretty clear that we needed a system that is easy to use, easy to learn, and easy to work with.”

The teams then tested 3 proofs of concept (PoCs) to determine which approach would work best. The answer turned out to be migrating to a database and analytics system built using Amazon Aurora. Leadinfo would later also add Amazon Athena, a query service for analyzing data, and AWS Glue, a serverless data integration service.

With its decision to switch to a new data infrastructure, the next step was to begin migrating customer data from multiple existing databases to Amazon Aurora. “We had a lot of data, which all had to be migrated in a very efficient way so we didn’t duplicate anything or mess anything up,” says Kleppe. “So we started with migrating 5 customer profiles, then 20, 50, 100. After we picked out all the things that could go wrong or did go wrong, we migrated our whole customer base.”

This iterative approach worked well. By identifying complexities that arose during each stage of migrating the large datasets, Leadinfo was able to make subsequent stages of the process work faster.

Moving all of its customer data to the new system took about a month and a half. After that, “we saw an enormous increase in efficiency and the cost average decreased by 30 percent,” says Kleppe. “And those are expected to decrease much more.” The eventual reduction in costs is expected to be 60 percent.

Customers didn’t notice any issues during the migration. After the migration was completed, though, they quickly began noticing improvements. “They have noticed that our software is much more stable, that the data is always there when they need it to be,” Kleppe says. “This is important, because they build their whole sales model on our products.”

Leadinfo’s developers are also able to roll out new features for customers more quickly than before, because the migration made software updates more efficient by bringing data from multiple databases into one place.

For example, with customer data now consolidated into a single database, Leadinfo was able to add many more filtering options to its software. This lets customers fine-tune information about who is visiting their websites, so they can target sales prospects more precisely. Filtered results also load more quickly than before, showing up on customers’ screens in less than 1 second. “In general, loading times for a larger customer were 1 minute before the migration,” Kleppe says. “Now, they wait 0.5 seconds.”

Developers are more efficient because they no longer have to search deep into code that’s distributed across multiple databases. With all data now on a single database, it’s easier to identify and fix software issues.

This also helps Leadinfo bring new developers on board more quickly, because they no longer need to be trained in what data is stored where. “Before, we had so many different systems and data platforms,” Kleppe says. “It took our developers a long time to learn what works and what doesn’t work. Now, we just have one system, Amazon Aurora, and we say, ‘Hey, here are the keys to the kingdom.’”

With an improved ability to manage a large and growing customer base, Leadinfo expects to continue expanding globally. It also plans to add more features that customers have been asking for, such as integration with customer relationship management systems or the ability to handle screen recordings.

The company is now also able to roll out features to specific markets—for instance, support for specific lanaguages or currencies. These new options make it possible for customers to tailor how they use Leadinfo’s software for their particular needs.

Using Amazon QuickSight to analyze customer data to identify usage patterns and trends, Leadinfo is gaining insights to help it keep growing while staying efficient and managing costs. “I could tell you how many customers we added today, how many trial users we have in the Netherlands versus the UK, what their conversion rates are, how many customers churn and cancel a subscription,” Kleppe says. “It’s really an insight into everything that’s going on in the company, which makes decision making so much easier.”

Leadinfo is using those insights to develop a business roadmap to follow in the year ahead. But the migration project has already meant significant progress for the company. “In the end, it really brought our company 10 steps forward,” Kleppe says.