About Ziplines
Ziplines Education partners with universities to provide high-impact, digital-first career training so individuals can confidently pursue the career they’ve always wanted. Ziplines is a series A-funded ed-tech startup with one goal—helping students attain the real-world skills they need to thrive in careers they love by partnering with universities.
Ziplines has created a name in the B2B2C education space and provides real-world courses to students in partnership with universities.
About This Project
Ziplines is a series A-funded ed-tech startup with one goal—helping students attain the real-world skills they need to thrive in careers they love by partnering with universities. Before the series A funding, Ziplines had a small team performing marketing, payments, and LMS operations manually. They hit a growth curve and all their systems and manual processes failed to handle the sudden growth.
Ziplines wanted to build a brain called CLAS(Central Learner Administration System) that connects HubSpot(CRM), Stripe and Affirm(payment systems), Canvas(LMS) and SCORM(course delivery). We partnered with them to build out CLAS.
Understanding the Challenge
Ziplines reached out to get our perspective on their scaling challenges. The growing company needed help streamlining its many moving processes.
To meet the demand for its courses and satisfy various marketing and sales needs, Ziplines adopted several different tools for marketing, payments, delivery
Internal tools that Ziplines used:
Hubspot
- CRM
- Lead Capture
- Learner Database
Stripe & Affirm
- Payment
Canvas & SCORM
- Open source LMS integrated with sharable content.
Maintaining consistency and objectivity while evaluating essays is difficult
Lack of accuracy and reliability in manual grading
While these solutions worked very well independently, none of them talked to each other. Because they were working in silos they had to hire more people to make them work cohesively. But the lack of integration between the platforms was developing into a major hassle as the company was scaling
Technologies
How We Made It Happen
The aim was to make systems(CRM, payments, delivery platform) talk to each other for smoother operations. The technology was to fasten operations and reduce human error, giving consistent, repeatable results with remarkable performance.
Ziplines partnered with us, considering our vast expertise in product strategy, product engineering and our understanding of the problem its context and our ability to transparently provide valuable insights.
We wanted to create a brain(CLAS – Central Learner Administration System) that talked with systems, with processing capabilities and automate mundane operations done by humans. The goal of the platform was to build a solution that could evaluate the actions taken by students such as form submissions, payments, course delivery and with that context automate operations such as tying payments with submissions and creating student profiles in the course delivery platform(Canvas).
Keeping in mind the need of the hour, we quickly set up a team comprising Backend Engineer, Tech Lead, QA and a project manager for the project. Ziplines kickstarted the project with a series of calls with our product owners and we created a comprehensive roadmap and evaluating the potential challenges that needed to be tackled.
We determined the right tech stack for CLAS with the apt integrations to ensure all operations were performed smoothly by the brain that we created.
(I) Product Roadmap to visualise the different functionalities for CLAS
a) Backend Administration Dashboard
Students can submit interest forms on the marketing website providing their email.
Those submissions will create entries in HubSpot and CLAS.
CLAS with a token based system tie up submissions in Hubspot with enrollments in CLAS.
The payments will pass the enrollment token to the Stripe metadata.
A webhook from Stripe will tie up enrollments in CLAS with payments in Stripe.
The enrollments will then become paid students.
Paid students will then kick off another workflow to create users in Canvas
On course completion the students will be marked as completed customers in CLAS and then eventually in Hubspot to ensure they can be marketed other courses by the marketing team.
All the logs of emails, payments, to be stored in CLAS as the single source of truth.
(II) Our approach to building operational automations
a) Identifying the right tools:
We identified the best practices and different tools required by carefully considering the budget and the requirements. Choosing the right process and test data is crucial for any successful application. The team identified all the business workflows and considered all edge cases as we were dealing with important business data like prospects, customers, payments.
- We conducted a tech review and proposed a product workflow, architecture design.
- We designed and implemented an updated DB schema which was then reviewed by product owners and stakeholders.
- We explored and prepared numerous workflows and integrations before proposing the brain for the system.
b) Integration and Testing:
We set up a proper testing environment for the platform, which was totally detached from the current system. This ensured seamless training and testing of the system from time to time to make it more robust. All workflows tied back to CLAS ensuring that CLAS continues to be the single source of truth and data is not lying at various places making it easier for the business teams to follow a data trail.
c) Monitoring and Setting the feedback loop:
Once we set up the tool, regular monitoring was needed to evaluate the system. We architectured a good feedback system so the business teams could check the discrepancies in the data. It further checked whether the data was accurate, which was essential to take the brain live and replace existing processes.
We then defined and implemented the KPIs for internal analytics and business reporting. We developed training and documentation for all internal teams to ensure that all stakeholders are equipped to use CLAS. We conducted regular demo/review sessions with stakeholders/product owners, and thorough end-to-end testing was done before going live.
How BetaCraft Made
a Difference
01
CLAS helped reduce manual operations time significantly.
02
We formed a great relationship with the team and are continuing to grow CLAS for the last 4 years.
03
CLAS contributed in helping Ziplines scale 10x in 3 years
