Data-Driven SaaS Product for Marketing Budget Planning
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Planful
Planful: Data-Driven SaaS Product for Marketing Budget Planning
"A team of Waverley engineers helped build a web-based SaaS data-driven product that automates budget planning and tracking."
Plannuh, a Boston-based marketing automation startup, turned to Waverley to transform their validated prototype into a full-fledged SaaS platform. Waverley's cross-functional team handled architecture redesign, AWS cloud migration, Python backend refactoring, Angular frontend modernization, and comprehensive QA. The result: a market-ready platform that secured $4M in seed funding from Glasswing Ventures and Google's Gradient Ventures.
Planful
Plannuh offers AI-driven automation of marketing strategy and tactics, consolidating marketing plans, budgets, and metrics into a single cloud-based system. Founded by experienced engineering leaders who had previously worked with Waverley, the company moved quickly to secure investment and bring product to market. By 2020, Plannuh had raised $4M and positioned itself as a must-have tool for enterprises managing complex, multi-channel marketing budgets.
Project Analysis
Plannuh had validated product-market fit through their prototype but faced the classic startup scaling challenge: proving engineering rigor to investors while shipping features at market speed. Three blockers stood in the way:
Architecture debt: The prototype lacked scalability, component decomposition, and proper data modeling. Building investor-ready features on that foundation would slow development.
Legacy tech stack: The codebase was fragmented across Python 2.7 and older frameworks, making it difficult to hire, hard to extend, and risky to operate at scale.
Infrastructure overhead: On-premise servers required manual management, limiting deployment velocity and increasing operational risk.
What We Delivered
Waverley assembled a full-stack team of architects, frontend engineers, backend engineers, DevOps specialists, and QA professionals to rebuild Plannuh's platform:
AWS migration: Moved the entire system from on-premise infrastructure to AWS, introducing modern deployment models, build automation, and CI/CD pipelines using AWS services (CodePipeline, CodeBuild, CodeCommit, CodeDeploy, CloudFormation) and Docker containers.
Backend refactoring: Upgraded from Python 2.7 to Python 3.7, rebuilt the API using REST conventions, and introduced automated documentation. Optimization work improved page load speed and database query performance—critical for handling growing customer workloads.
Frontend modernization: Upgraded from Angular 4.3 (unsupported) to current versions, built complex data processing features including an Excel-like expense table, implemented filtering/tagging systems, and ensured smooth data import/export workflows.
Feature delivery: Shipped major features under tight timelines: expense tracking with complex calculations, payment model integration, multi-currency support, and visualization dashboards—all while the client pitched to investors.
QA rigor: Implemented automated testing frameworks, functional/smoke/regression testing across multiple environments, cross-browser compatibility checks, and API testing with Swagger.
Outcomes & Impact
AWS migration: On-premise infrastructure eliminated; deployment velocity increased; operational complexity reduced
Tech stack modernization: Python 2.7 → 3.7; Angular 4.3 → current; improved hiring velocity and development productivity
Feature velocity: Major features shipped every sprint: expense tables, filters, payment integrations, charts—enabling investor demos
Funding milestone: $4M seed round from Glasswing Ventures and Google's Gradient Ventures (June 2020)
Market traction: Multi-customer production deployment; feature roadmap aligned with market feedback
Conclusion
By taking strategic responsibility for architecture, infrastructure, and rapid feature delivery, Waverley enabled Plannuh to prove product-market fit and engineering rigor simultaneously. The partnership demonstrates Waverley's strength in startup-to-scale transformations: modernizing tech debt, building cloud-native systems, and shipping investor-grade products without sacrificing code quality. Rich Sadowsky, VP of Engineering at Plannuh, observed: "Looking at the difference between our original product and the product we've developed in collaboration with Waverley, it's clear that they've had a huge impact on our business. Their work contributed to the value that resulted in investments from Glasswing and Gradient."
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