Flatfile importer eliminates onboarding bottleneck, helps enable rapid growth for Flow

The challenge

As businesses have rapidly shifted to a remote world – a trend that is likely to continue – connecting, communicating, and collaborating has become even more difficult. While the growth of project management tools help, many of these solutions force teams to conform to rigid workflows that may not fit every organizational culture. 

Flow solves that problem by providing a flexible, modern task and project management system that enables teams to get organized, stay on track, and achieve more by providing insight into what’s happening at every level. Flow X, the company’s flagship product, combines five apps in one – task management, project management, calendar, chat, and newsfeed – that makes it easy to organize work into projects with clear goals, files, and timelines. Over 300,000 teams in more than 140 countries around the world now use Flow.

“Flow X does more of the hard, tricky, cumbersome work so that it takes less effort to get more things done,” said Daniel Scrivner, CEO of Flow. “We’ve developed Flow X so every user and every organization can find and use the workflow that makes sense for them.”

Solving the data import challenge for customers making the switch to Flow

As Flow continues to quickly grow, the challenge of importing data has become more acute. According to Daniel, having an importing tool is the number one request from customers. The need for a comprehensive data importing solution is especially critical when it comes to attracting and onboarding new customers. 

“As we started onboarding larger companies with lots more people, the lack of an easy way for them to transfer data into our tool had become a showstopper,” said Daniel.

Flow chose Flatfile’s data importer to solve that problem. 

“The majority of our customers are moving from another competitor over to Flow so making importing simple is essential for us,” said Daniel. “The import issue is literally make or break for companies in the trial phase. They want to know they will be able to move their data without an issue before they commit to a subscription. Incorporating Flatfile was an important step for us.”

Daniel explored the option of building a data importer but decided against it.

“For the past 18 months all of our resources have been focused on improving the core features of our product and developing Flow X, the new version of our product,” said Daniel. “We just didn’t have time to build a data importer. And it’s not only building it but also maintaining it and adapting it as CSV formats change. That’s why we chose Flatfile. It removes a huge, long-term burden for us which allows us to focus on things that truly move the needle for our customers.”

Flow was able to quickly implement Flatfile’s data onboarding platform, Flatfile’s data importer.

“In terms of total time to get the product and connect it, it was under 10 days, which is pretty incredible,” said Daniel.

Flow began using Flatfile’s data importer to ingest customer files on a project by project basis where customers were able to extract the data from a previous project management tool, import the data into a spreadsheet, sort it by project, and chunk it out into separate CSV files. Using Flatfile made it much easier to import the data from previous project management tools into Flow.

Helping to streamline the customer onboarding process

Flow is now integrating Flatfile into its Flow X product which has provided significant benefits to customers.

“Having the functional capabilities of Flatfile’s data importer has been a huge benefit,” said Daniel. “When we get asked by a customer if we have a data import solution we can quickly say we do. That’s important because once a customer signs up they’re incredibly excited about Flow, but they quickly get to the point where they realize that they have to set it up and get their data into it. We provide them with the Flatfile solution and the import problem is solved.”

Daniel also sees having Flatfile as a significant marketing advantage and is touting it in its onboarding emails.

“Being able to reliably claim that it’s easy to import data as part of the onboarding process is a big advantage,” he says. “The question comes up a lot and Flatfile makes it a simple box to check when the customer asks about it.

“We expect that Flatfile will significantly help our growth going forward,” said Daniel. “Flatfile’s data onboarding platform removes a huge bottleneck that could prevent us from growing by making it easy for customers to choose Flow and take their tasks with them. 

“What’s great about Flatfile and what I was really drawn to about it is that it creates an importing experience that handles the complexity behind the scenes and all the customer sees is a drop dead, simple user interface that makes the importing process easy for anyone on their team to handle,” added Daniel. “It’s been a powerful solution for us.”