Featured
Alex Pan
Co-founder and CEO, Storipress
David Peng
CTO, Storipress
Storipress automates content publication and reader interaction to turn company blogs into revenue-generating leads.
“With Axiom and OpenTelemetry, performance optimization is plug and play.”
Alex Pan
Co-founder and CEO, Storipress
Takeaways:
- Storipress replaced ssh into Docker containers with Axiom ingest of OpenTelemetry events.
- Engineers no longer have to run benchmarks or create custom data pipelines to uncover slow operations or troubleshoot more complex and error-prone customer experiences.
- Sentry, which they still use, requires engineers to wait for an error to occur to get visibility. They often must try to reproduce an error to see the associated logs — which Sentry can’t render for complex event data. Axiom handles these needs.
- Sales and BDR teams also make use of Axiom to automate and analyze form submissions.
About Storipress
Storipress provides a full-stack solution to transform companies into media entities by automating blog production, collecting emails, and tracking and analyzing reader behavior. Leveraging machine learning, Storipress builds customer data profiles to feed AI for automated outbound communications that target readers’ pain points. Features include a shared kanban interface, a content calendar, multiplayer editing, and AI assistance to accelerate writing and ensure brand voice & compliance.
Founder Alex Pan summarizes their modus operandi: “We run AI throughout your entire blog. Pull out what pain points you would have as a reader of a blog article and then pass that on to AI to write cold outbounds to you. It can draft a sales email that is so incredibly resonant with your own pain points that on average people will respond 20% to 40% of the time.”
Storipress is a fast-growing company whose customers include IDEO, Rippling, Eppo, and Espresso Displays.
The challenge: Troubleshooting and analysis was too late, too hard
To provide the multiple services each Storipress customer needs separately, “We create a lot of static sites,” says Alex. “When we started collecting logs, we needed to ssh straight into Docker — a very incovenient way of viewing logs,”
The solution: Easy insights for both problems and opportunities
“You don’t have to wait for the first error. You can instantly see what the shape of the data looks like and any errors that occur.”
David Peng
CTO, Storipress
Storipress uses Axiom for both backend and front end monitoring. “We started using OpenTelemetry when we realized Axiom had an OTel integration,” Alex says. “It allows our engineers to, for example, understand what the slowest operations are and do performance optimization easily.” Previously engineers needed to create benchmarks and build custom data pipelines to get the data they needed to analyze. “With Axiom and OTel, it’s plug and play,” Alex says. For $25 per month, Axiom’s Team plan saved Storipress weeks of engineer time to set up, and eliminates another 1-2 days in maintenance each month.
Not only is it easy, it also allows engineers to see problems before customers report them. “Let’s say we’re developing a new feature that, if something happens, would degrade the user experience. We want to be notified every time something happens. Our CTO David sets up a monitor and pings us to that channel — that’s really, really useful.”
Storipress engineers also found Axiom’s piped query language (APL) easy to learn so they could set up queries that look for specific error messages and alert them. They also use Sentry for monitoring, but prior to Axiom hadn’t been able to see the logs associated with a problem until after it occurred. This often meant trying to reproduce the problem to recreate the associated logs. “With Axiom, you don’t have to wait for the first error,” Alex says. “You can instantly see what the shape of the data looks like, what everything looks like, as well as any errors that occur.” It saves the team hours of troubleshooting time every month.
Moreover, Sentry isn’t able to display some of the more complicated data within some of those logs. Axiom catches and keeps everything, making all logs past and present available for query on demand. With its schema-on-read support, engineers don’t need to figure out in advance how to parse any present or future events — they can load them into Axiom now and figure them out later. “APL is a quick way of letting developers find and filter and query data that they need,” says Alex.
“Axiom allows us to debug complicated algorithms by literally logging every single request — we don’t need to throw away anything.”
Alex Pan
Co-founder and CEO, Storipress
As an example of the complexity they need to track, Alex explains a bit about Storipress’ collaborative editor: “It’s like Google Docs, where multiple people can collaborate on the same document. The screen contains every single edit. The way it merges changes is complicated — it’s difficult to debug due to the complicated nature of the algorithm. Axiom allows us to debug merge issues issues with conflict-free replicated data types CRDT by literally logging every single request made by the editor — we don’t need to throw away anything because Axiom is so cheap it’s insane.”
Sales opportunities in OpenAI logs
Storipress logs OpenAI requests as well — not for problems but opportunities. A form submission on the site’s demo page captures the visitor’s job title and name of company. It submits those along with the OpenAI request log from the eval Storipress runs on the vistor’s content to Axiom. They’ve configured Baserow to read from Axiom every ten minutes to update their database of customer leads for quick response. “As a BDR person, I now know your name, your job title, your company, so I can proactively reach out. Yeah, Axiom is used for sales at Storipress as well.”
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