About
Fix Security is a Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) tool that helps maintain the security, compliance, and operational efficiency of cloud infrastructure.
Website
Founded
San Francisco, 2021
Company size
5–10
Use cases
Customer life cycle management
Team communication
The team at Fix Security enjoys using best-of-breed apps. But when they tried to use Zapier to connect them, the user experience and controls didn’t live up to the standard they had come to expect.
As a founder, CEO Lars Kamp of Fix Security believes you need to do every internal process once yourself—finance, marketing— before handing it over to your team. In 2023, one process on his mind to rethink was customer lifecycle management. Having followed the “best of breed” approach to toolstack selection, the team was happy with Attio as their CRM, Discord for communication, and other modern web apps. But to uplevel how the team managed customers, Lars needed an automation tool to bring these apps together.
In choosing an automation tool, Lars went with the brand he knew: Zapier. He built zaps to aggregate customer data, and it worked well enough. But when he handed off the process to the team to run with, issues arose.
Doris Houng, a developer experience engineer at Fix Security, was the new owner of customer automation. As she tried to build more complex logic into their customer zaps, she quickly became frustrated. Slowness and lag. Losing meticulously entered data with a dropdown value change. Limited logic capabilities. It became too much overhead.
“Zapier works perfectly fine if all you’re doing is triggers and actions. The issue is when you start to add some more logic to it. Then it just falls apart.”Doris Houng, Developer Experience Engineer at Fix Security
Doris was done with Zapier after struggling to encode logic for customer workspace creation, user stages, and list management. “If there was a way to never have to open the tool again, I was very open to an alternative.”
Then, while browsing Attio’s documentation, Doris learned about Relay.app. “It looked like it worked, and that it was built for the modern web,” she said. She never looked back.
“I found Relay.app, and I never looked back. I canceled Zapier yesterday.”Doris Houng, Developer Experience Engineer at Fix Security
With Relay.app, Doris rebuilt their customer workflows quickly and in a more streamlined way. The most transformative feature was being able to call workflows from within another workflow. This was the kind of feature where “once you have it, you can’t go back to not having it.” No longer would she have to maintain duplicate logic across multiple zaps.
Another efficiency win was Relay.app’s take on paths: In Relay.app, she could continue to add steps to a workflow after a path split, regardless of which path is taken. Duplicated steps across all paths had been tedious to set up and maintain in Zapier.
Transitioning to a new tool from a 10+ year old platform like Zapier, Doris acknowledges that Relay.app doesn’t yet have everything Zapier does, like thousands of integrations and tons of action. However, its custom HTTP request capabilities filled in any gaps. “It’s been a really easy transition,” she found.
As Lars observed, although Zapier’s thousands of connections are appealing, a single company doesn’t actually need them all. They just need a handful—and that handful needs to be deep. Relay.app’s integrations fulfill that need.
By transitioning from Zapier to Relay.app, Doris was able to implement a new, better baseline for their customer lifecycle management processes—and feel far less frustrated in the implementation process.
The team went from everything in Zapier to everything in Relay.app in less than two weeks. Now Doris oversees over a dozen Relay.app workflows and counting, connecting Attio, Calendly, PostHog, Discord, and more. They have a complete picture of their users and workscapes, the team is kept in the loop automatically about important events, and they no longer worry about duplicated users and unintentionally overwritten customer stages.
Thinking ahead, having automated their core needs, new possibilities are unlocked. They look forward to triggering more interactions with their target users than they would be able to do without Relay.app. “We’re a very small team so we need to be able to make the most of what we have,” says Lars. And automating workflows with Relay.app allows Fix Security to do just that.
“The fallacy with Zapier is that a) it has the most tools on their platform and b) that it has pre-made Zaps. But then you quickly start to realize that you don't need a gazillion connections; you just need a handful. But you need to go deep in those connections, and you can't do that with Zapier.”Lars Kamp, Co-Founder & CEO of Fix Security
