How SongFlow helps songwriters stay in sync using NotificationAPI

We spoke with Songflow’s founder about their notification needs in a collaboration tool, why they picked NotificationAPI, the integration experience and the results.

Case Study
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5
 Min read
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February 9, 2024

Songflow is a collaboration tool for songwriters and music producers. It offers project management features for music production, paired with audio tools such as a real-time audio editor, AI melody generation, voice transformation, and more.

As a collaboration software, notifications were at the core of their product, ultimately leading them to choose NotificationAPI as their notification service.

We spoke with Songflow’s founder, songwriter, and software developer, Jacob Critch, to learn more about the notification needs of a collaboration and project management tool, why they picked NotificationAPI, the integration experience and the final results.

Songflow's Project Management Dashboard

Tell us about you and SongFlow!

I’m Jacob Critch, Co-founder & CEO of Songflow. Songflow is a platform that enables musicians to create songs in a fraction of the time with our real-time collaborative audio editor, synced project management dashboard, and cutting edge AI voice conversion.

Notifications enable collaboration

As a real-time collaboration tool, having fast in-app and email notifications is essential. We use notifications to instantly signal to other collaborators when something happens in a project, for example: comments, song credits, uploaded mixes, invitations, and lots more. Traditionally, music creators have had to manually email or message all their collaborators when something happens on a music project. With NotificationAPI, we're able to take the administrative burden off of musicians, allowing them to spend time being creative.

Email notification from Songflow

Why NotificationAPI?

As technical co-founder and CEO, I obviously have a lot of work on my plate - so when we were building the MVP for Songflow, I used existing or off the shelf tech as much as possible - That's why I was thrilled to try out NotificationAPI when I learned about it.

Time Saved

NotifcationAPI allowed me to have a production ready notification system in our product within a couple of days for both email and in-app notifications. If I were to build that out myself, I could've wasted weeks of time and gotten a lesser result. It feels great to have a secure and fast notifications system that I don't have to host or lose sleep over!

Integration Experience

Integrating NotificationAPI was a breeze. At Songflow we use Remix, a SSR full-stack framework. Even with our slightly unorthodox stack, NotificationAPI's support team was able to clear up any issues we had in a timely and friendly manner. Setting up NotificationAPI is a matter of copying a few lines of code and getting to work on your templates using the intuitive editor.

In terms of technical implementation, I created some backend functions that call NotificationAPI to send out events using the recipients UIDs. NotificationAPI lets me easily set any metadata and mergeTags I want to be attached to my notifications. I can easily read these variables in the NotificationAPI templates editor. There is even support for different API keys for staging or production environments.

Final Thoughts

I recommend checking out NotificationAPI to any software team building a product that needs notifications. It's painless to try out. I'll definitely be using NotificationAPI for our future products, and in any other suitable projects I do later in my career!

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