Joshua Paine

Done-For-You Engine

2021 · Ruby on Rails

Simplero is an all-in-one platform for marketing, selling, and delivering information products. That means the system supports quite a variety of object types with complex relationships, and getting the most out of the system means building webs of related objects. They had already added “Done-For-You Campaigns” before I joined the company in 2019, but creating them required defining in code the details of all the objects to be installed. In practice, this was enough friction that the intended library of templates never grew beyond about three.

The Done-For-You Engine is a system I made so that sets of related objects could be cloned directly from regular objects staff or customers make in the software, no code necessary. The intro video below shows a relatively simple case of cloning three related objects. It doesn’t show the deep extent to which the engine does the right thing. The links and relationships between those objects will be translated to equivalent connections between the copies. Dependent objects like email attachments and all the steps in the automation will be created and connected, too—but not dependent objects that shouldn’t be cloned, like the customers currently flowing through the automation.

This is one of the coolest and most useful bits of system design I’ve done recently, even if the user experience is an un-flashy “it just does what I meant”. I’m afraid we sat on it, using it only internally, for over a year before we made it available to all our customers. I had (still have!) visions for how the UI could be much more powerful, and I let the great be the enemy of the good.