This week, Sylvain Fabre, CTO @ AssoConnect, tells us about the startup and his experience using Clever Cloud.
Can you introduce AssoConnect?
AssoConnect is a software for nonprofits. It is a SaaS application that helps them to save time on all the administrative tasks: Accounting (super easy, no need to be an accountant), Payments (donations, memberships, events, products), Members management (donors, members, volunteers…), Emailing, Website…
The whole software is built for people who have absolutely no technical skill. We started in 2009 while we were students and involved in campus associations: we used to spend too much time on these boring administrative tasks and had not signed up for that. Today more than 1,500 nonprofits use AssoConnect and now focus on their missions.
What do your users love about your product?
Our nonprofit admins love to save time while providing a better service to their own users. We focus on the product and listen to our clients feedback to make AssoConnect easier and easier: users love when we implement their suggestions!
What is your major difficulty at the moment?
AssoConnect is growing quickly: having new clients means new use cases we have to consider. It’s quite difficult to implement all the features requests while keeping AssoConnect relevant and easy to use for everyone.
What is the next future of AssoConnect?
We have a lot of new features coming! A major one is an update of our Algolia integration. We have been using this French hosted search API with faceting, typo-relevant and search-as-you-type features for a while within many features of AssoConnect. We are working on a much better user experience: an admin will be able to retrieve in a few milliseconds in a table and a map the female users who gave more than 100€ in less than 5 donations in the last 4 months living in France with a facet on their district and their age. Nonprofits need to know their contributors.
Did you start AssoConnect on Clever Cloud?
We started AssoConnect on a shared hosting competitor, then we discovered PaaS with another competitor and landed on Clever Cloud when we hit the competition hosting limits. Unlike the competition, Clever Cloud hosting offers auto-scaling which is useful to only pay for what you need while having as much power as you need. Switching was easy as we only use common and open source products like PHP or MySQL.
What do you like most on Clever Cloud?
The interface and products are no-brainers and the team availability helps you fix bugs quickly. This is what we like most at Clever Cloud. This really makes a difference when you need some help in your work.
What feature are you expecting the most?
By far I really expect automatic scaling for MySQL and Redis add-ons like for PHP instances so technical matters won’t be an issue while my company grows. Automatic replication and failover would be useful too but they can configure it, you just have to ask the support. I’m also waiting for Let’s Encrypt SSL certificates but heard it’s coming.
How would you pitch Clever Cloud to a non-technical person?
Clever Cloud is like an all-star house-keeping service: when you go home you don’t want to think about cleaning, laundry, grocery shopping, Wifi and TV setup, any boiler fixing… You just need a functional house ready to live in.