Doubling email volume with 99% delivery: How Nextdoor is leveraging SendGrid

Nextdoor is the free and private social network for your community to ask questions, get to know one another, and exchange local advice and recommendations. Since its inception in 2010, Nextdoor has seen incredible growth and today serves more than 160,000 communities.

Alex Karweit is an Engineering Lead on the email infrastructure team at Nextdoor.

Challenge

Nextdoor uses email to notify users of updates in their neighborhood. When Nextdoor’s email sending volume was growing 50% faster than member growth, it meant that Nextdoor needed an email platform that can grow with their needs.

Originally, Nextdoor created an email solution in-house, and then moved to a small email service provider (ESP). Unfortunately, both of these solutions presented a number of challenges:

• Internal resource drains with 4 full-time engineers keeping the email program afloat.
• Deliverability concerns with messages constantly being delayed or sent twice.
• Email issues or outages arising without experts to help correct them.

Solution

In light of those challenges, Nextdoor re-evaluated what they wanted for their email program, and decided they needed a more reliable, scalable solution that didn’t require so much work from internal engineers.

Nextdoor chose to partner with SendGrid because:

• They could rely on SendGrid to deliver their email correctly, allowing Nextdoor to focus engineering effort on improving the product instead of managing email.
• SendGrid reliably sends over one billion emails a day for thousands of customers, so Nextdoor knows they’re not pushing the envelope of what SendGrid can do.
• Nextdoor could leverage SendGrid’s team of email experts for ongoing premium support, account management, and email delivery services to proactively drive the success of their email program. Nextdoor can rest assured knowing that their dedicated Customer Success Manager is vigilantly monitoring their email program for issues and is just an email away for any questions or troubleshooting.

Result

Since moving to SendGrid, Nextdoor has more than doubled its customer base, experiencing:

• Fewer internal resources required with less than one engineer’s time spent managing email.
• Faster, more reliable email delivery with a 95% reduction in latency.
• Deliverability rates that are consistently above 99%.

The Bottom Line

SendGrid is the perfect email partner for Nextdoor because of its:

• Expertise. SendGrid’s expert team will help you get the most out of your email program with 24×7 Expert Support, monthly delivery consulting, and proactive account monitoring.
• Reliability. SendGrid’s powerful APIs and deliverability experts save you headaches, enabling you to send with confidence.
• Proven deliverability at scale. SendGrid is the most widely-used cloud email platform with over 78,000 paying customers trusting us to deliver more than 45 billion emails per month.