Jason Nickel knew there was a better way to generate leads for his real estate investment company. So he bootstrapped his compliant texting and skip trace application, Lead Sherpa, offered it to a few beta-testers, and within a year, had a burgeoning business.
Originally, Lead Sherpa was built on Heroku. One of Jason’s contract developers recommended switching to Linode because of the company’s award-winning support and highly-trained team of service professionals.
“The incredible growth we were experiencing made us realize that we needed someone who understood how to architect our platform from a solid foundation,” Jason said. “The problem was that we weren’t quite ready to bring on someone full-time or even part-time.”
Jason expanded Lead Sherpa’s professional services relationship with Linode, effectively adding a system administrator on an as-needed basis without having to fill a full-time position.
Linode Professional Services provides small business and enterprise customers consulting and advisory support, architectural best practices around security and reliability, as well as performance and budget optimization.
“Linode has been proactive, pointing out issues that may arise based on different metrics that we track,” said Jason. “They’re quick to jump on everything, help us understand what the issues are, and work through them.”
In addition to a half-dozen standard cloud instances, Lead Sherpa relies on Linode’s Dedicated CPU plan for data analytics processing. They also use NodeBalancers, which intelligently route incoming requests to backend Linodes helping the Lead Sherpa application scale to accommodate an increasing user base.
“Other cloud providers want our business, but none offer the level of service we get from Linode. That’s really important to us,” said Jason. “We value the relationship we have with Linode and the team. That level of service is something you can’t put a price on.”
Jason believes that entrepreneurs starting their own business should work with cloud providers that always put the customer first.
“For companies like ours, a service like Linode means you work with a company that will be there for you if, or when, you need them, and you don’t have to wait 24 hours for a response. I’m not sure who wouldn’t want that level of customer dedication.”
