Astrafuse & Xano Backend DevOps Case Study

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Challenges

Solutions

Why Xano

Results

Challenges

Astrafuse needed everything built from the ground up pre-launch — so co-founder and CEO Chris Kennedy leveraged Xano. He has a technical background, and wanted a platform that met their needs while maintaining the functionality of a traditional programming language.

Get to market faster

Chris needed to optimize time and resources. “I had to get everything in place to market as quickly as possible to keep confidence from our affiliates, keep confidence from our lead buyers,” he explained.

Integrate tools and synchronize information

Astrafuse has different systems for lead generation, distribution, and affiliate performance tracking across multiple SaaS tools. Synchronization is essential to their workflow, and Astrafuse needed a way to connect all their systems.

“I went from full-time developer, full-time DevOps, full-time manager of other contributors to now… I’m the strongest technical person. And I’m CEO. And with these tools, I’m able to accelerate and move things faster.”

Christopher Kennedy

CEO, Astrafuse

Solutions

With Xano, Chris was able to accelerate development to an unprecedented speed. Xano also serves as a single source of truth and connector for all of Astrafuse’s SaaS tools and data, significantly increasing their workflow efficiency and capability.

Hand off DevOps

“Do I set up everything, set up DevOps and build all the code and have to manage that plus be CEO? …Knowing that I wouldn’t have to worry about those is really what sold me on Xano.”

Christopher Kennedy

CEO, Astrafuse

He didn’t need to worry about deployment or network security. He didn’t need to manage cloud infrastructure, or set up a developer environment just to start running code. Xano handled everything, so Chris could get started immediately — and focus on building.

Enhance workflow efficiency

Astrafuse uses Xano to synchronize information. An API endpoint pulls data from their tools and fills in whatever is missing from the other system, conducting both one-way and two-way syncs.

Chris credits background tasks as one of Xano’s most helpful features. He has webhooks throughout all systems to synchronize them — but when he can’t wait for or implement a webhook, he schedules background tasks.

When Astrafuse onboards new affiliates, for example, they create dedicated campaigns in multiple SaaS tools. Scheduled tasks synchronize those campaigns and records across the tools.

This significantly reduces the time it takes for their CFO to do affiliate reporting and payroll. “Otherwise, it would be a nightmare. [Our CFO] would be doing everything in Google Sheets and then figuring out the discrepancies.”

Increase functionality

Chris connects tools and transforms their data, in a way that he couldn’t with each tool on its own. To capture leads, Astrafuse builds landing pages and surveys with GoHighLevel. LeadExec then qualifies and distributes those leads. Chris wanted to enhance and validate lead contact information collected from GoHighLevel, but couldn’t easily build that into either tool.

“Xano acts like this connector that allows me to expand on the logic that I want.”

Christopher Kennedy

CEO, Astrafuse

An API endpoint in Xano validates the contact information, ultimately handing off higher quality leads from GoHighLevel to LeadExec.

Maximize reporting power

Astrafuse uses Xano to consolidate data and create reports from a centralized platform. “Let's marry the data and look at it at a high level, instead of being all over the place with CSV exports or running limited reports in these tools,” Chris explained.

A huge industry problem is affiliate traffic fraud — people use VPNs and self-submit multiple times on campaign forms. With Xano, Astrafuse gets a unified, high-level look at what’s going on between their affiliate tracking and lead distribution systems. This significantly simplifies their process to identify fraud red flags.

Rather than getting isolated reports from these tools and then jumping back and forth, they simply pull all their data into BigQuery for unified reporting.

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Why Xano?

Chris looked into solutions where he wouldn’t need to code everything from scratch — content management systems, Zapier, and serverless functions.

After a Xano demo, he was initially skeptical. “I know how challenging programming can be. To try and build a UI around what it takes to be a developer, that's a pretty complex problem to solve.”

But he also saw immediate value that sold him on Xano:

Xano is scalable — with no hard limits on volume of users, traffic, or storage.
Chris was initially worried about optimizing CPU, memory, and storage for all of Astrafuse’s different applications and services. But he saw the flexibility in Xano’s different pricing plans, and their options for custom solutions. “Xano would be a partner to grow with us.”
Xano is visually intuitive and accessible to non-technical team members.
“The biggest advantage I have is that Xano gives this visual presence of what's happening on the backend,” Chris explained. Before, he couldn’t share his work with non-technical team members because they were just blocks of code. Now, they can follow along by visualizing the logic with Xano — and they feel empowered to contribute.
Xano is no-code/low-code, but technical enough.
“They said, you're a developer. Why aren't you building this? And it was time to market.” Chris knew that he didn’t need to implement a full custom solution — and he didn’t have the time. With Xano, he could accelerate development while meeting all of Astrafuse’s functionality needs. He could also still write code in Xano with Lambda functions. “People were reluctant to believe that I was building what I was building without coding. They just couldn't fathom the concept,” he said.

Results

Astrafuse accelerated development by 3x

“I was able to rebuild technology I had worked on for a solid two years, in eight months.”

Chris no longer had to be a full-time developer, full-time DevOps engineer, and full-time contributor manager. He could build faster and dedicate more time to being CEO.

Astrafuse saved over $150k

Before Xano, Astrafuse worked with a full-time DevOps partner that cost them about 150k over the span of two years. With Xano, Chris has been able to build everything himself. “That’s a huge savings for us, being a bootstrapped company.”

As Astrafuse grows, Chris plans to continue using Xano as a key developer tool. “Xano unifies how you get work done.”

The platform provides a standardized build environment. Everything is done in the web editor, which speeds up onboarding and removes the biases that cause conflict on traditional developer teams. “You don’t have to think about what operating system somebody is using. They can use their favorite browser site in Xano and start working.”