Powered by MongoDB, Bliinx is Changing the Way Software is Sold

Adam Hughes
January 26, 2022 | Updated: October 17, 2022
#BuiltWithMongoDB #Startups

Regardless of the industry, sales organizations often struggle to determine the best way to identify potential customers.

There are many schools of thought as to what the best approach is, and when the most opportune time a sales executive should reach out might be. One startup company aims to make that process as simple and efficient as possible.

Bliinx, based in Montreal, Quebec, Canada, was created to help revenue teams focus and act on the most qualified leads and accounts based on product usage, billing, firmographic and marketing engagement data. Bliinx’s mission is to “change the way we sell software.”

We spoke with Bliinx co-founders Fred Melanson and John Espinoza about starting the company, their journey, and where they see Bliinx headed in the future.

How did you decide to start Bliinx?

Melanson: I realized that it’s hard to build quality relationships with a lot of people, especially people that you’re trying to get investments from. I would ask people a lot of questions, and those were around relationship building and the question became how do you manage your clients relationships? Everyone would answer that they do everything manually, across siloed channels, and it’s a pain to manage and scale. So I figured there must be something there, that was really the spark that we created Bliinx on.

What does Bliinx do?

Melanson: We are a lead prioritization platform for bottom-up B2B SaaS, so we help sales teams - mainly account executives - to know who the best leads are at the best accounts to reach out to, and also to identify when it’s the best time to reach out to them. And the way we do that is by finding signals and insights in their sales conversations, their marketing engagement, and product usage. Our tool will plug into your system and find insights that are worth engaging on and scoring your talents and your leads, so the sales reps are focused on the best customers at the best time, without having to use generic one size fits all automation, which can be great for top of funnel SDRs, but for CSMs, who are really about nurturing, closing, and expanding revenue, it has to be more thoughtful and and more human because it’s getting harder and harder to get people’s attention and retention is immensely valuable for SaaS companies, so our tool helps us just find the best people at the best time to grow revenue faster.

What are some tools that Bliinx connects with?

Melanson: The basic one will plug into your email and calendar, we also have LinkedIn integration, which is pretty unique to sync your LinkedIn messages and plug into your CRM. It also connects with Slack to receive notifications and right now we are building integrations with Segment, Intercom, Stripe, and Snowflake, so reps can have product insights. We are also building new integrations for LinkedIn and Twitter so that reps can also have content marketing engagement insights to act on.

Where are you right now with Bliinx? How has the journey been, have you gone through accelerators and are you funded by VC’s?

Melanson: I started working on the project about a year-and-a-half, two years ago, it was really an idea out of college. So after a lot of learning, we raised an angel round really quickly, and a couple of months later we got accepted to 500 Startups. From there we raised a pre seed round and we’ve been iterating on the product, trying to really find our positioning, and find the people that have the problem, and figure out what’s the best version of the problem that we can solve.

How did getting accepted into 500 Startups shape Bliinx?

Melanson: It’s a game changer. I don’t think we would have been here today if it wasn’t for 500 Startups. It was an amazing experience, you’re surrounded by so many smart people, and have such an expertise that you don’t normally have access to. You get what you take out of it, so I pushed it to the max, every time there was office hours, I would take it, every time there was an investor meeting open, I would take it. I would really, really push and it got us to great results, and it’s through 500 Startups that I’ve met our lead investor.

Can you tell us about your tech stack?

Espinoza: I want to keep it simple, this is the main rule of the company. We've built our system with microservices, use NodeJS and NoSQL for our back-end and have built a robust back-end infrastructure to build our proprietary engines for data orchestration. The rest of our platform is built on typescript and we use MongoDB to manage our databases.

How did you decide to go with MongoDB?

Espinoza: My first startup, we used MongoDB, and had a great experience. We use MongoDB, and I really love it. We don’t have to care about backups, or anything to do with the infrastructure. It’s plug and play, so what’s amazing for us is I come from the background where you have to build everything. So going with the NoSQL database is fantastic because you don’t have to maintain all the schema, which can be really messy. Like I said, we try to keep it simple.

What excites you now about working with Bliinx?

Melanson: With the rise of companies that are product-led or marketing-led, and the fact that people are working remotely, sales is changing, and I think it’s for the better. Tools on the market need to adjust, yes people want to try it out before they buy it, but they don’t want to go through a sales rep, they still want to meaningfully connect with people in sales. And sales reps are a big part of that journey, it’s just that you don’t reach out cold to sell, you have them try it, and then you’re more of a consultant, or the hand holder through that way. So it excites me about figuring out a way for people to build meaningful connections in business, with us being so remote.

Espinoza: Everything that we build in here is new for me, and that’s what excites me. Working with a lot of data coming from everywhere, and building something valuable for you, let’s do something valuable with a lot of data. This is the magic box that we build in our building, this is a great opportunity.

What advice would you give to someone starting up their own company?

Melanson: 99% of people just don’t start, so my main advice is to just start. That’s really what the hurdle is, that’s the toughest part, people think it’s recruiting a technical co-founder, or raising money is the toughest part, but it’s starting. You can go so far validating your idea, without having a single line of code.

Espinoza: Don’t start with titles. In the beginning, you’re just people with a project. The other is to go talk to people who are doing the same thing. Finding other people to bounce ideas off of, just to validate ideas, that is something that has helped me a lot.

Interested in learning more about MongoDB for Startups? Learn more about us here.

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Scale Out Without Fear or Friction: Live Resharding in MongoDB
Live resharding was one of the key enhancements delivered in our MongoDB 5.0 Major Release . With live resharding you can change the shard key for your collection on demand as your application evolves with no database downtime or complex data migrations . In this blog post, we will be covering: Product developments that have made sharding more flexible What you had to do before MongoDB 5.0 to reshard your collection, and how that changed with 5.0 live resharding Guidance on the performance and operational considerations of using live resharding Before that, we should discuss why you should shard at all, and the importance of selecting a good shard key – even though you have the flexibility with live resharding to change it at any time. Go ahead and skip the next couple of sections if you are already familiar with sharding! Why Shard your Database? Sharding enables you to distribute your data across multiple nodes. You do that to: Scale out horizontally — accommodate growing data or application load by sharding once your application starts to get close to the capacity limits of a single replica set. Enforce data locality — for example pinning data to shards that are provisioned in specific regions so that the database delivers low latency local access and maintains data sovereignty for regulatory compliance. Sharding is the best way of scaling databases and MongoDB was developed to support sharding natively. Sharding MongoDB is transparent to your applications and it’s elastic so you can add and remove shards at any time. The Importance of Selecting a Good Shard Key MongoDB’s native sharding has always been highly flexible — you can select any field or combination of fields in your documents to shard on. This means you can select a shard key that is best suited to your application’s requirements. The choice of shard key is important as it defines how data is distributed across the available shards. Ideally you want to select a shard key that: Gives you low latency and high throughput reads and writes by matching data distribution to your application’s data access patterns. Evenly distributes data across the cluster so you avoid any one shard taking most of the load (i.e., a “hot shard”). Provides linear scalability as you add more shards in the future. While you have the flexibility to select any field(s) of your documents as your shard key, it was previously difficult to change the shard key later on. This made some developers fearful of sharding . If you chose a shard key that doesn’t work well, or if application requirements change and the shard key doesn’t work well for its changed access patterns, the impact on performance could be significant. At this point in time, no other mainstream distributed database allows users to change shard keys, but we wanted to give users this ability. Making Shard Keys More Flexible Over the past few releases, MongoDB engineers have been working to provide more sharding flexibility to users: MongoDB 4.2 introduced the ability to modify a shard key’s value . Under the covers the modification process uses a distributed, multi-document ACID transaction to change the placement of a document in a sharded cluster. This is useful when you want to rehome a document to a different geographic region or age data out to a slower storage tier . MongoDB 4.4 went further with the ability to refine the shard key for a collection by adding a suffix to an existing key. Both of these enhancements made sharding more flexible, but they didn’t help if you needed to reshard your collection using an entirely different shard key. Manual Resharding: Before MongoDB 5.0 Resharding a collection was a manual and complex process that could only be achieved through one of two approaches: Dumping the entire collection and then reloading it into a new collection with the new shard key . This is an offline process, and so your application is down until data reloading is complete — for example, it could take several days to dump and reload a 10 TB+ collection on a three-shard cluster. Undergoing a custom migration that involved writing all the data from the old cluster to a new cluster with the resharded collection. You had to write the query routing and migration logic, and then constantly check the migration progress to ensure all data had been successfully migrated. Custom migrations entail less downtime, but they come with a lot of overhead. They are highly complex, labor-intensive, risky, and expensive (as you had to run two clusters side-by-side). It took one MongoDB user three months to complete the live migration of 10 billion documents. How this Changed with MongoDB 5.0: Live Resharding We made manual resharding a thing of the past with MongoDB 5.0. With 5.0 you just run the reshardCollection command from the shell, point at the database and collection you want to reshard, specify the new shard key, and let MongoDB take care of the rest. reshardCollection: "<database>.<collection>", key: <shardkey> When you invoke the reshardCollection command, MongoDB clones your existing collection into a new collection with the new shard key, then starts applying all new oplog updates from the existing collection to the new collection. This enables the database to keep pace with incoming application writes. When all oplog updates have been applied, MongoDB will automatically cut over to the new collection and remove the old collection in the background. Lets walk through an example where live resharding would really help a user: The user has an orders collection. In the past, they needed to scale out and chose the order_id field as the shard key. Now they realize that they have to regularly query each customer’s orders to quickly display order history. This query does not use the order_id field. To return the results for such a query, all shards need to provide data for the query. This is called a scatter-gather query. It would have been more performant and scalable to have orders for each customer localized to a shard, avoiding scatter-gather, cross-shard queries. They realize that the optimal shard key would be "customer_id: 1, order_id: 1" rather than just the order_id . With MongoDB 5.0’s live resharding, the user can just run the reshard command, and MongoDB will reshard the orders collection for them using the new shard key, without having to bring the database and the application down. Watch our short Live Resharding talk from MongoDB.Live 2021 to see a demo with this exact example. Not only can you change the field(s) for a shard key, you can also review your sharding strategy, changing between range, hash, and zones. Live Resharding: Performance and Operational Considerations Even with the flexibility that live resharding gives you, it is still important to properly evaluate the selection of your shard key. Our documentation provides guidance to help you make the best choice of shard key . Of course, live resharding makes it much easier to change that key should your original choice have not been optimal, or if your application changes in a way that you hadn’t previously anticipated. If you find yourself in this situation, it is essential to plan for live resharding. What do you need to be thinking about before resharding Make sure you have sufficient storage capacity available on each node of your cluster. Since MongoDB is temporarily cloning your existing collection, spare storage capacity needs to be at least 1.2x the size of the collection you are going to reshard. This is because we need 20% more storage in order to buffer writes that occur during the resharding process. For example, if the size of the collection you want to reshard is 2 TB compressed, you should have at least 2.4 TB of free storage in the cluster before starting the resharding operation. While the resharding process is efficient, it will still consume additional compute and I/O resources. You should therefore make sure you are not consistently running the database at or close to peak system utilization. If you see CPU usage in excess of 80% or I/O usage above 50%, you should scale up your cluster to larger instance sizes before resharding. Once resharding is done, it's fine to scale back down to regular instance sizes. Before you run resharding, you should update any queries that reference the existing shard key to include both the current shard key and the new shard key. When resharding is complete, you can remove the old shard key from your queries. Review the resharding requirements documentation for a full run down on the key factors to consider before resharding your collection. What should you expect during resharding? Total duration of the resharding process is dependent on the number of shards, the size of your collection, and the write load to your collection. For a constant data size, the more shards the shorter the resharding duration. From a simple POC on MongoDB Atlas, a 100 GB collection took just 2 hours 45 minutes to reshard on a 4-shard cluster and 5 hours 30 minutes on a 2-shard cluster. The process scales up and down linearly with data size and number of shards – so a 1 TB collection will take 10 times longer to reshard than a 100GB collection. Of course your mileage may vary based on the read/write ratio of your application along with the speed and quality of your underlying hardware infrastructure. While resharding is in flight, you should expect the following impacts to application performance: The latency and throughput of reads against the collection that is being resharded will be unaffected . Even though we are writing to the existing collection and then applying oplog entries to both its replicas and to the cloned collection, you should expect to see negligible impact to write latency given enough spare CPU. If your cluster is CPU-bound, expect a latency increase of 5 to 10% during the cloning phase and 20 to 50% during the applying phase (*) . As long as you meet the aforementioned capacity requirements, the latency and throughput of operations to other collections in the database won't be impacted . (*) Note: If you notice unacceptable write latencies to your collection, we recommend you stop resharding, increase your shard instance sizes, and then run resharding again. The abort and cleanup of the cloned collection are instantaneous. If your application has time periods with less traffic, reshard your collection during that time if possible. All of your existing isolation, consistency, and durability guarantees are honored while resharding is running. The process itself is resilient and crash-safe, so if any shard undergoes a replica set election, there is no impact to resharding – it will simply resume when the new primary has been elected. You can monitor the resharding progress with the $currentOp pipeline stage. It will report an estimate of the remaining time to complete the resharding operation. You can also abort the resharding process at any time. What happens after resharding is complete? When resharding is done and the two collections are in sync, MongoDB will automatically cut over to the new collection and remove the old collection for you, reclaiming your storage and returning latency back to normal. By default, cutover takes up to two seconds — during which time the collection will not accept writes, and so your application will see a short spike in write latency. Any writes that timeout are automatically retried by our drivers , so exceptions are not surfaced to your users. The cutover interval is tunable: Resharding will be quicker if you raise the interval above the two second default, with the trade-off that the period of write unavailability will be longer. By dialing it down below two seconds, the interval of write unavailability will be shorter. However, the resharding process will take longer to complete, and the odds of the window ever being short enough to cutover will be diminished. You can block writes early to force resharding to complete by issuing the commitReshardCollection command. This is useful if the current time estimate to complete the resharding operation is an acceptable duration for your collection to block writes. What you Get with Live Resharding Live sharding is available wherever you run MongoDB – whether that’s in our fully managed Atlas data platform in the cloud , with Enterprise Advanced , or if using the Community Edition of MongoDB. To recap how you benefit from live resharding: Evolve with your apps with simplicity and resilience: As your applications evolve or as you need to improve on the original choice of shard key, a single command kicks off resharding. This process is automated, resilient, and non-disruptive to your application. Compress weeks/months to minutes/hours: Live resharding is fully automated, so you eliminate disruptive and lengthy manual data migrations. To make scaling out even easier, you can evaluate the effectiveness of different shard keys in dev/test environments before committing your choice to production. Even then, you can change your shard key when you want to. Extend flexibility and agility across every layer of your application stack: You have seen how MongoDB’s flexible document data model instantly adapts as you add new features to your app. With live resharding you get that same flexibility when you shard. New features or new requirements? Simply reshard as and when you need to. Summary Live Resharding is a huge step forward in the state of distributed systems, and is just the start of an exciting and fast-paced MongoDB roadmap that will make sharding even easier, more flexible, and automated. If you want to dig deeper, please take a look at the Live Resharding session recording from our developer conference and review the resharding documentation . To learn more about MongoDB 5.0 and our new Rapid Releases, download our guide to what’s new in MongoDB .
January 26, 2022

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Five Languages, One Goal: A Developer's Path to Certification Mastery
MongoDB Community Creator Markandey Pathak has become a certified developer in five different programming languages: C#, Java, Node.JS, PHP, and Python. Pursuing multiple certifications equips developers with a diverse skill set, making them invaluable team members. Fluency across different programming languages enables them to foster platform-agnostic solutions and promote adaptability, collaboration, and informed decision-making, which are crucial for success in the global tech landscape. To understand what led Markandey to take on so many certifications while managing a busy and successful career, we spoke with him to gain insights into the challenges and triumphs he faced. What motivated you to pursue certification in multiple programming languages, and how has achieving such a diverse set of skills impacted your career? C was the first programming language I learned, followed by C# and the .NET ecosystem a few years later. Transitioning to a new language like C# after knowing one was straightforward. I then delved into ASP.NET, JAVA, and subsequently PHP. Despite the differing syntax of these languages, I found that fundamental programming concepts remained consistent. This enlightening realization led me to explore JavaScript and, later, Python. Such a diverse skill set made me a go-to resource for many senior leaders seeking insights. This versatility allowed me to transcend categorization based on programming ecosystems in the workplace, evolving my mindset to develop platform-agnostic solutions. I believe in the adage of being a jack of all trades while still mastering one or more. I took on the challenge of discovering MongoDB drivers available for various platforms. I created sample applications to practice basic MongoDB concepts using specific drivers, and soon, everything fell into place effortlessly. What tips or advice would you share with someone who looks up to your achievement and aspires to become a certified developer in multiple languages like C#, Java, Node.JS, PHP, and Python? How can they effectively approach learning and mastering these languages? Before attempting proficiency in MongoDB across multiple languages, it's crucial to prioritize understanding fundamental concepts such as data modeling practices, CRUD operations, and indexes. Mastering MongoDB's shell, MongoSh, is essential to grasp the workings of MongoDB's read and write operations. Following this, individuals should select a programming environment they're most adept in and practice executing MongoDB operations within that ecosystem. Constructing a personal project can aid in practically observing various MongoDB concepts in action. Utilizing resources such as MongoDB Certification Learning Paths , practice tests, and MongoDB Documentation is vital for excelling in certification exams. Additionally, it's advisable to undertake the initial certification in the programming language one feels most comfortable with. Reflection is key; saving or emailing exam scores enables individuals to identify areas needing improvement for future attempts. With proficiency in C#, Java, Node.JS, PHP, and Python, how do you perceive the role of versatility in today's tech industry, especially regarding job opportunities and project flexibility? Programming languages, very much like spoken languages, are merely a medium. The most important thing is knowing what to say. The tech industry depends on problems, and developers seek solutions to them. Once they have a solution, programming languages help make those solutions a reality. It’s not hard to learn different programming languages or even to master them. Knowing the basics of different programming ecosystems can give developers an edge regarding job opportunities. It makes them flexible and enables them to make crucial and informed decisions in choosing the correct tech stack or defining good architecture for solutions. In your experience, how does fluency in multiple languages enhance collaboration and innovation within development teams, particularly in today's globalized tech landscape? Fluency or even practical awareness about programming languages or ecosystems promotes versatility in problem-solving, facilitates cross-functional collaboration, supports agile development, enables integration with legacy systems, fosters global collaboration, reduces dependency, and empowers informed decision-making, all of which are crucial for staying competitive in today's globalized tech landscape. As a MongoDB Community Creator, how do you leverage your expertise in these five languages to contribute to and engage with the broader tech community? What advice would you offer aspiring developers seeking to expand their skill set? I aim to open-source my MongoDB-focused projects across various ecosystems, accompanied by detailed articles outlining their construction. Since these projects were designed with exams in mind, they serve as skill-testing tools for developers and comprehensive guides to the various components comprising certification exams. I advocate for developers to choose a favorite language and compare others to it, as this approach facilitates a quicker and more efficient understanding of concepts. Relating new information to familiar concepts makes learning easier and more effective. The MongoDB Community Advocacy Program is a vibrant global community designed for MongoDB enthusiasts who are passionate about advocating for the platform. Our Community Creators Program welcomes members of all skill levels eager to deepen their involvement in advancing MongoDB's community and technology. We empower our members to expand their expertise, visibility, and leadership by actively engaging with and advocating for MongoDB technologies among users worldwide. Join us and amplify your impact within the MongoDB community! Elevate your career with MongoDB University 's 1,000+ learning assets. Access free courses and hands-on labs, and earn certifications to boost your skills and stand out in tech.
April 24, 2024