How NextDoor decreased development time by 75% to advance its product roadmap

Nearly 1 in 3 U.S. households are on Nextdoor, which makes the platform an attractive advertising channel to both local and national businesses. Nextdoor primarily uses three applications to manage advertisements for its clients: Placements.io, Google Ad Manager (GAM), and Salesforce.

Since Salesforce couldn’t connect to GAM, a team member would have to manually upload ad metrics from GAM into Salesforce once per week. Not only did this delay ad performance visibility for sales and accounting teams, but also risked inaccurate decision-making from days-old reports. Nextdoor also wanted to automatically send out invoices to clients—a process that typically required a full three days.

Calculating client running balances was similarly time and resource-intensive. Nextdoor needed to know client ad spend that had been used vs. what hadn’t in order to accurately account for its revenue and liabilities. Yet under the current growth rate, Nextdoor estimated that it would have to hire two full-time employees solely dedicated to tallying client running balances.

As its main revenue driver, Nextdoor knew that automating kinks in its advertising process chain would spur new revenue growth. And there was an equally promising benefit—freeing up engineering resources to focus on more complex product deliverables would accelerate its product roadmap.

NextDoor underwent an extensive evaluation of automation technologies and ultimately selected Workato for its ease of use and straightforward licensing model. With Workato, there was no need for the team to undergo specialized training; the platform was intuitive to integrate with existing systems from the get-go.

In conjunction with its order management platform Placements.io, NextDoor built an automation connector between GAM and Salesforce in order to accelerate ad performance reports. Now, instead of weekly, manual uploads, ad metrics are uploaded into Salesforce daily for more accurate reporting.

To automate customer running balances, Nextdoor has integrated product data with revenue data from Stripe. Eventually, this data will be automatically ported over to Workday and Workday Prism and, following post-processing, will automatically generate customer rolled-forward balances in order to identify up-to-date revenue amounts and liabilities.

By syncing information between Nextdoor, Salesforce, and Workday, Nextdoor no longer has to manually prepare and send out invoices. Instead, invoices are now automatically generated for increased visibility and faster payments.

Since implementing Workato, the Nextdoor engineering team has reduced time spent on integration development by 75%. Not only is this a considerable weight lifted from the team’s shoulders, but the time savings has greatly accelerated Nextdoor’s product roadmap and better positioned the company for its eventual public offering.

Sales and accounting teams are no longer doing guesswork from days-old ad metrics, but can run reports from Salesforce with fresh data each day. Nextdoor has halted hiring for resources to manage customer rolled-forward balances; instead, automatic reports calculate exactly how much revenue and liabilities Nextdoor has at any given time.

Invoices automatically sent out to customers eliminate three days of work (or 24 hours per invoice batch) and ensure greater transparency among customers and faster payments. And as Nextdoor scales its usage of Workato, many more automation use cases are in sight.

In the future, Workato will allow Nextdoor to see all client activity in Salesforce instead of going back and forth between various systems, a time savings that will prevent Nextdoor from having to hire many more customer service agents. And as Nextdoor scales its usage of Workato, it can count on reliable integrations that require little maintenance or troubleshooting.