Lucid Relies on Postman throughout the Entire Sales Cycle
Lucid is a marketplace for market research that provides an automated way to test ads and survey consumers. Using 15 billion data points attributed to 200 demographic variables, Lucid uses human data to provide real-time insight into online users.
Since its start in 2010, Lucid has grown to 56 engineers across offices in London, New Delhi, and its headquarters in New Orleans. The company has doubled in size for the last 4 years in a row, and recently secured $60M in funding, the largest deal in Louisiana, Alabama, and Mississippi combined, within the last decade. Lucid engineers use Postman for the entire sales cycle through prospecting, onboarding, and rolling out new features.
Having robust testing infrastructure in place enables you to make decisions and execute on things that would otherwise not even be feasible.
With Postman, I don’t have to be conservative or cautious to the point of impedance when it comes to making changes; I can iterate rapidly and with confidence.
Brenan Keller, Senior Engineer
Demonstration tool for sales prospects
Lucid created a marketplace for market research called Fulcrum to programmatically buy and sell survey research sample. Some API consulting discussions are with market research experts who might not have a development background. Postman plays a key part in those types of technical consultations. The engineers will screenshare with those prospects, using their Postman Collection for a live demonstration.
Onboarding with the Run in Postman button
Once a deal is signed, partner developers prepare for the integration by reviewing the Fulcrum API documentation. Lucid has embedded the Run in Postman button in their API documentation to help partner developers get up to speed quickly. New developers can import the entire Fulcrum collection into Postman for a quickstart. The 61 API endpoints are organized into folders with helpful descriptions to easily guide new developers through onboarding.
In addition to onboarding partner developers, Lucid includes the Run in Postman button in the README files of their private repositories so their own developers can get up to speed in the most efficient way possible.
“We have 21 team collections which help to rapidly disseminate information on new internal APIs throughout the company,” says Brenan Keller, Senior Engineer at Lucid.
QA for new feature enhancements
When Lucid prepares to roll out new features and functionality, engineers use Postman to test and troubleshoot their own APIs. Engineers write their own tests in Postman to check response status codes, content types, and to validate payloads. Then, they use the collection runner for functional testing in various branches of development.
“The functional tests save a ton of time during local development and smoke-testing production deploys,” says Cameron Sampson, Senior Engineer at Lucid.
The QA team at Lucid built a Postman Collection with nearly 100% test coverage on their external APIs as a key component of their deployment plan. “Having robust testing infrastructure in place enables you to make decisions and execute on things that would otherwise not even be feasible,” says Keller.
What do you think about this topic? Tell us in a comment below.