TeeBox is an assistive tool for all golfers, aiming to simplify the scheduling and booking process for anyone ready to tee off. Using “TeeBot” and user preferences, TeeBox looks to make peace of mind par for the course when setting up your next golf outing.

As an assistive tool, TeeBox relies on notifications to communicate with users regarding availability and bookings. The importance of communication leads them to NotificationAPI as their choice for a third-party notification service.

‍We spoke with Kelly Gold - TeeBox's founder - to learn about TeeBox’s need for notifications to help deliver the best experience for golfers, his experience with integration, and the role of NotificationAPI as a solution.

Tell us about you and TeeBox!

I’m a Colorado native with a career in tech, specializing in developer tooling, and data integration. Struggling to get out to golf one day, I got the idea for TeeBox. We built a better way to book tee times. Not only does TeeBox help you search more nearby courses than any other platform, it can book the times for you when they pop up. We’re launching in Colorado this year, and hope to be in other cities by the end of summer 2024.

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Why NotificationAPI?

Notifications are a key component of our user experience. Since our service can “book for you later” we need a good line of communication to notify our users. Primary notification events are when the user signs up, when we create a new booking and user retention.

I’ve built a few projects with Twilio, and last year with 10DLC the setup became a lot more time-consuming and complicated. All the new campaign management and approval processes add tons of extra time and tinkering to develop a working notification system. Being comfortable with APIs, I was looking for an API alternative that may be faster to implement.

After spending just a few minutes I made my first request, and I was instantly impressed by how much quicker I was able to start sending messages than on traditional SMS platforms. I knew this was a good choice to speed up our roadmap and focus on our core features.

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Benefits

The biggest expenditure is time. I’d estimate saving 30 hours over 2 months compared to using Twilio, SNS, or another service.

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Integration Experience

The onboarding is best-in-class. Probably my favorite part of using NotificationAPI is how simple it is to make your very first request and send your first email/SMS. The domain mapping guidance was pretty helpful as well.

One pattern we came across is needing to engage with our users to verify their phone numbers. NotificationAPI doesn’t offer 2-way communication out of the box, but turns out we don’t need it. Instead of replying “yes” we send them a dynamically generated URL which contains a short-lived token. The user clicks the URL passing the token back to our server, verifying the user’s phone number.

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Final Thoughts

NotificationAPI allows us to send high-quality email and SMS notifications to our users with very little development time. The API and SDK are super easy to use, and we were sending our first notifications in minutes.

I would absolutely use NotificationAPI again!

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