How Taxfix created a scalable customer data infrastructure and doubled its revenue growth

In just six short years, Berlin-based Taxfix has grown to become Europe’s leading mobile tax app. The company is on a mission to promote financial wellbeing by simplifying the tax filing process and helping users maximize their returns. Using a smart, personalized question-and-answer interface, the Taxfix app leads users through a series of easy, form-free steps and then submits filings directly to tax offices. Over one billion euros in tax refunds were returned to Taxfix users in October 2021. 

From its founding, Taxfix has been focused on quick growth. The company’s engineering team knew they needed to establish a scalable customer data infrastructure early on to avoid a potential “data swamp” that would slow down projects and cause data inconsistencies across their teams and tools. They wanted a customer data platform that could act as a single source of truth and a connected data ecosystem that could easily expand as they added to their tech stack and user base. 

Taxfix brought on Twilio Segment almost from the beginning, recognizing right away that Segment had all the functionality the company wanted in a customer data platform. Rather than devoting scarce time and resources to building an in-house data ingestion pipeline, Taxfix’s engineering team was up and running with Segment within a month, allowing them to focus instead on building a great product for Taxfix customers. 

When Taxfix decided to upgrade from an in-house data warehouse to Snowflake’s managed, cloud-based solution, Segment’s partnership with Snowflake enabled a seamless connection and migration process. Using Segment and Snowflake together, Taxfix has been able to:

• Collect and centralize customer data from multiple sources with simple connections

• Improve data warehouse scalability while reducing engineering time and effort

• Give marketing the freedom and control to create highly targeted campaigns

• Provide access to near real-time data for product usage tracking and A/B testing 

• Increase customer insights while reducing dependencies on data and engineering teams

• Grow their business with peace of mind, knowing their systems can keep up

Setting up for success from the beginning with a solid data infrastructure

With an eye to rapid growth, Taxfix began searching for a customer data platform in 2017, the year their app was released. Taxfix teams wanted to be able to leverage customer data to make informed decisions and provide interactions that kept the company moving forward while avoiding data silos and bottlenecks that could slow progress.

To ensure a high level of confidence in their underlying data, the Taxfix engineering team created a comprehensive list of features for their ideal data platform:

• Distributed ownership: So product teams would be able to add, delete, or change an event and see the change in their reports.

• Quality pyramid: To flag issues quickly and as close as possible to the data producers.

• Optimized for writes: To combat data silos and integrate data into the data lake faster.

• Codified knowledge: So naming conventions, schema-as-a-code, and monitoring/alerting could be automated. 

• Self-service enabled: Moving quickly and avoiding bottlenecks was a top priority.

• Easy to discover (data catalog): To give the team clean data with clear meaning to build actionable insights.

• Easy to extract and distribute (APIs, SQL, webhooks, streaming, etc): Data use should be as democratized as possible across their teams.

After debating whether to build their dream customer data platform in house, the team decided that serving their customers was ultimately a more valuable use of engineering resources than integrating and maintaining an internal platform. They opted to go with Twilio Segment because it not only checked all the boxes on their list but could be implemented much more quickly. “We chose Segment because it’s a powerful data streaming / integration solution, provided as SaaS, which means we don’t have to spend our resources maintaining the infrastructure and have teams of engineers running it,” explains Dmytro Lytvyn, Senior Data Architect at Taxfix.

The team integrated Segment Protocols with their data catalog to define events through a schema, which ensured validation, quickly identified tracking errors, and made it easy to send data downstream to tools used across the business. The team’s CRM tool at the time, Intercom, integrated with the product in a few days, as did their A/B testing solution. They were fully up and running within a month and able to focus their engineering efforts on creating the best product for their customers.

For a data warehouse, the Taxfix team initially opted to build an in-house solution using PostgreSQL. However, within a few years that setup became unscalable. The number of sources and tables being used for models calculation had grown and performance was slowing—their ETLs with analytics tools Metabase and Looker were taking forever to run. 

They wanted to move to a cloud data warehouse solution that could ingest both raw and processed data from all of their sources and enable near real-time analytics. The team looked into Redshift and BigQuery, but for logistics and cost reasons, neither was a good option. Snowflake offered the team a free trial, so they decided to give it a test run.

Bringing Segment and Snowflake together

Over the course of the one-month trial, which included dedicated support, the Taxfix team migrated some of their datasets and models to Snowflake and quickly became convinced it was the solution they were hoping for. “We tested most of our ETLs and the performance was very good, so we chose Snowflake,” says Dmytro. The team migrated the rest of their customer data to Snowflake and, as Dmytro says, have been ”living happily ever after.” 

Taxfix uses Snowflake as both a data lake and a data warehouse, eliminating the need for separate storage solutions and allowing their teams to easily transform and analyze all types of data in one location. They also no longer have to worry about in-house performance tuning, indexes, partitions, and the like, saving valuable engineering time and cost. 

Segment’s partnership with Snowflake made the Taxfix team’s decision to switch that much easier. Using a single Segment Connection, data from multiple sources was loaded directly from Segment into Snowflake. “With Segment, we were able to integrate our tracking data easily,” says Dmytro. “It was also very helpful during the migration process, because the switch was pretty much seamless from the data ingestion perspective.”  

Taxfix now syncs all of its data sources to Snowflake via Segment, including backend and frontend events from its website and mobile app and customer data from Braze CRM, Sendgrid, Facebook Ads, and Stripe. Aggregating all of this data in Snowflake gives Taxfix a 360-degree view of its business, enables historical and predictive analyses, and provides a dashboard for various domains, including financial KPIs. 

Giving teams the freedom and flexibility to optimize customer data

Taxfix’s product teams use events data collected in Segment to do near real-time tracking of  existing and newly released product usage and make informed decisions about product performance. The company’s marketing team uses data from Segment in their current CRM, Braze, to enrich user profiles with meaningful attributes that drive nimble, targeted marketing campaigns.

The marketing team particularly values the Computed Traits feature in Segment’s Twilio Engage, which allows them to add new custom attributes to user profiles in Braze using aggregated events as a source. When Taxfix launched a new product called “Do It for Me,” Braze used Segment data to immediately target users who chose this option in real-time, no coding necessary.

And with Segment feeding data directly to Snowflake, the company’s data team can do near-real time analyses without having to manually integrate new event types. Snowflake in turn connects to Looker and Metabase, giving the team the flexibility to do both curated and more ad hoc reporting, depending on their needs.

Combining Segment’s customer data platform with Snowflake’s cloud-based data warehouse has given Taxfix the context and structure they need to use data more effectively and optimize their product and marketing to create great user experiences and interactions.

Twilio Segment’s raw data queue can also be stored in Snowflake, making it easy for the Taxfix team to reprocess data if there is a mistake of re-send data to a new source. 

Scaling with peace of mind

Having the customer data infrastructure in place to scale fast has been critical to Taxfix’s continued success. The company is still growing—they doubled their revenue in the first quarter of 2022 and expanded into Spain. With Segment and Snowflake, Taxfix can confidently increase usership while ensuring customer satisfaction and loyalty. Says Dmytro, “We can scale having peace of mind, knowing we can add new event types and data sources and our data infrastructure is ready for that.”