How Building a MarTech Tool Taught Me to Filter Scarcity, Authenticity, and Automation

Let me tell you something I learned the hard way: in MarTech, the difference between a tool that *works* and one that *works long-term* isn’t more code — it’s clearer thinking. After years building marketing automation tools, I’ve realized the real skill isn’t coding speed. It’s knowing what to ignore.

Why Scarcity and Authenticity Matter in MarTech

Scarcity and authenticity sound like marketing buzzwords until you’ve spent three weeks debugging a “simple” HubSpot-to-Salesforce sync. Then, they become survival skills.

I remember my first real project: I built a flashy email automation tool with AI subject-line generators, animated CTAs, and real-time analytics. It looked impressive in demos. But when 50,000 users signed up in a week? It broke trying to sync a single custom field. That’s when I got it: authenticity beats aesthetics.

Think of your MarTech stack like a coin collection. Most tools are counterfeit — shiny on the surface, hollow underneath. The real value? The ones built to last, built to work, not just look good in a pitch deck.

Scarcity in a Saturated Market

There are over 12,000 MarTech tools out there. Yeah, really. But here’s the truth: most will be gone in five years.

Scarcity in this market isn’t about being early. It’s about being enduring. The tools that survive are the ones that:

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• Keep architecture clean — fewer moving parts mean fewer failure points.

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• Protect data integrity — especially when syncing between systems like CRMs and CDPs.

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• Handle API failures gracefully — because nothing fails like a webhook during a product launch.

It’s like collecting rare coins: you don’t find value by digging faster. You find it by knowing what to keep — and what to toss.

Building Marketing Automation That Doesn’t Break

Marketing automation isn’t about automation for automation’s sake. It’s about creating systems that keep working when things go sideways — because they will.

I’ve seen too many tools collapse under the weight of their own complexity. The culprit? Engineers treating automation like a straight line from A to B. Real marketing systems? They’re more like a maze. And your job is to make sure the ball keeps rolling.

Start with a Resilient Core

Here’s a rule I live by: assume everything will fail. Not “might.” Will.

That means baking in idempotency, retry logic, and circuit breakers from day one. No exceptions.

“Idempotency isn’t a luxury—it’s a survival mechanism.”

Here’s a real-world example: an email dispatch function that won’t spam your users if the API hiccups. I use this in every project now.


const sendEmail = async (job) => {
const { emailId, userId } = job.data;
const idempotencyKey = `email:${emailId}:${userId}`;

// Check if already processed
const alreadySent = await redis.get(idempotencyKey);
if (alreadySent) {
console.log(`Email ${emailId} already sent to ${userId}`);
return { status: 'skipped', reason: 'idempotent' };
}

try {
await emailApi.send({
to: userId,
template: emailId,
context: job.data.payload
});

// Mark as sent to prevent duplicates
await redis.set(idempotencyKey, 'sent', 'EX', 86400); // 24h TTL
return { status: 'sent' };
} catch (err) {
// Queue retry with exponential backoff
throw err;
}
};


This stopped a major client’s Black Friday campaign from sending duplicate emails last year. A small pattern. Big payoff.

Design for Asynchronous Workflows

Stop tying critical actions to live requests. Use queues. Period.

Example: when someone signs up in HubSpot, don’t fire off ten emails immediately. Instead:

1. Drop the event into a queue (RabbitMQ, SQS, Kafka).
2. Process it in the background.
3. Log the state.
4. Then trigger your CRM sync, CDP update, and email sequence.

This keeps your site fast — even when your backend is busy.

CRM Integration: Salesforce and HubSpot Are Not the Same

I used to think, “CRM is CRM.” Then I tried to sync 100,000 leads from Salesforce using the same logic I used for HubSpot. Spoiler: it didn’t go well.

Salesforce and HubSpot feel similar. But their APIs, data models, and limits? Worlds apart. Ignore this, and you’ll spend more time debugging than building.

Salesforce: The Enterprise Beast

Salesforce’s REST API is powerful, but it’s got rules. Lots of them.

What works:

• Use Composite or Composite Tree requests to cut down on API calls.

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• For big data? Use Bulk API 2.0. Don’t even think about REST for 50K records.
• Always track LastModifiedDate and sync incrementally. Full syncs are a time bomb.

Here’s how I do incremental syncs now:


const lastSync = await getLastSyncTime('salesforce_contacts');
const query = `SELECT Id, Email, FirstName, LastName FROM Contact WHERE LastModifiedDate > ${lastSync.toISOString()}`;
const results = await sf.query(query);


HubSpot: Developer-Friendly but Shallow

HubSpot’s API is clean. Easy to learn. But it’s also… limited. No native joins. Everything’s linked via associations, which can get messy fast.

My go-to fixes:

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• Always use associations to link contacts, companies, and deals.
• Rate limit to 100 calls per 10 seconds. Trust me, their API team watches.
• Webhooks are great — but validate the payload. I’ve seen malformed JSON crash entire pipelines.

This snippet handles webhooks safely with rate limiting:


app.post('/hubspot-webhook', async (req, res) => {
const { objectId, subscriptionType } = req.body;

// Rate limit: 1 req/sec per object
const rateLimitKey = `hubspot:${objectId}`;
const lastCall = await redis.get(rateLimitKey);
if (lastCall && Date.now() - lastCall < 1000) { return res.status(429).send('Too many requests'); } await redis.set(rateLimitKey, Date.now(), 'EX', 2); // Process asynchronously queue.add('process_hubspot_event', req.body); res.sendStatus(200); });

Customer Data Platforms (CDPs): The Heart of Modern MarTech

A CDP isn’t just a database. It’s the brain of your marketing stack. It knows who your customer is — across every device, campaign, and platform.

Building one? You’ll need:

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• Event ingestion — from your site, app, and APIs.

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• Identity stitching — matching emails, phones, and device IDs to real people.

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• Real-time updates — so your segmentation stays fresh.

Building a Minimal CDP

Start small. You don’t need Gartner-level complexity. A simple schema works:

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• user_id — your internal ID.

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• external_ids — links to Salesforce, HubSpot, etc.
• traits — demographics, preferences, tags.
• events — what the user did, when, and how.

Use PostgreSQL or MongoDB. Add a REST API. For real-time data? Kafka or AWS Kinesis.

Here’s how I handle identity resolution — matching users by email:


const resolveUser = async (email) => {
const normalized = email.toLowerCase().trim();
const user = await db.users.findOne({ 'traits.email': normalized });
if (user) return user;

// Fallback: check external IDs (e.g., from CRM sync)
const externalUser = await db.users.findOne({ 'external_ids.salesforce': { $exists: true } });
if (externalUser?.traits?.work_email === normalized) {
return externalUser;
}
return null;
};


Email Marketing APIs: The Unsung Heroes

Email still wins. No channel beats it for ROI. But sending at scale? It’s not as easy as it looks.

Common gotchas:

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• Rate limits (SendGrid: 10K/day free, Mailchimp: 1M/month).

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• Email rendering — yes, mobile CSS still breaks layouts.
• Deliverability — warm your IPs. Spam filters are picky.
• Personalization — merge tags are powerful, but overused.

Architecture for Scale

Never hardcode your ESP. I made that mistake once. When SendGrid raised prices, we had to rewrite half the app.

My fix? An EmailProvider interface:


class EmailProvider {
async send(template, to, context) {
throw new Error('Not implemented');
}

async batchSend(jobs, batchSize = 100) {
const chunks = _.chunk(jobs, batchSize);
for (const chunk of chunks) {
await Promise.all(chunk.map(job => this.send(job.template, job.to, job.context)));
await sleep(1000); // respect rate limits
}
}
}


Now we can swap providers in minutes. No code chaos. No vendor lock-in.

Filter for Value, Not Volume

Here’s the thing about building MarTech tools: it’s not about how much you add. It’s about what you leave out.

Whether you’re syncing CRM data, stitching identities, or sending emails, focus on systems that are:

• Idempotent — no duplicates, ever.

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• Resilient — handles API failures without crashing.
• Incremental — only processes what changed.
• Abstracted — insulated from vendor changes.

The best MarTech tool isn’t the one with the most features. It’s the one that quietly works, day after day. Like a rare coin pulled from a bin of fakes — valuable because it’s authentic, built to last, and impossible to replicate.

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