Introducing Fuse

With great excitement and anticipation, we are pleased to announce the launch of our first SaaS product, Fuse. Fuse is a brand-new CSV import tool, a data onboarding tool, and the last data importer you will ever need. Let’s take a deeper look at why we created Fuse, the problems it solves, and who can benefit from the solution.

What is Fuse?

Fuse is a customizable data onboarding tool. It takes the leg work out of CSV imports and customer data onboarding. Fuse is an embeddable and customizable CSV importer. With a small code snippet, you can add Fuse to your website and easily allow your customers or internal teams to bring CSV data in any format and map and transform it to a format that works for your system. No more messy CSV imports, just clean data.

So, what does a good data onboarding experience look like?

• It allows users to easily upload data in any format, not requiring manual effort to transfer data into a rigid CSV import template
• It allows users to quickly match uploaded data to fields in your system
• It intelligently performs required data transformations so that the user does not have to
• It has built-in data validation support, and the ability for users to quickly see any issues that they need to fix in order to successfully import their data

These are all features of Fuse. We hope to provide a better data onboarding and CSV import experience. Checkout out our promo mode to get a better sense for fuse:

Powerful, User-Friendly CSV Importer | Fuse

Why we created Fuse

Fuse was created to simplify the process of importing data into a system. While CSV imports might sound trivial on a surface level, creating an experience that lets your team or customers seamlessly import large CSV files of any format into your system is actually a complex task, and not many do it well.

In my experience as a software engineer, I spent countless hours on CSV imports and data migrations. In fact, I once spent over a year on a single data migration or ETL process. That one was particularly complex for various reasons and didn’t use CSV files, but the premise and challenges were the same as you face when doing CSV imports.

One of the ways that organizations often try to create CSV import experiences is by allowing customers to download data import templates for their customers to fill out. Not only is this methodology a bit archaic, but it is a frustrating and time-consuming process. This is particularly true when a new user is onboarded into a system. Customers often come with previous data that they need to upload to a new tool that they start using. When you have thousands of rows in a CSV file, it is important to allow these customers an intuitive experience for mapping their existing data into your system. Failure to do so means frustration on behalf of a new customer, and time spent by your team helping customers debug and fix data import issues.

Engineers on the Flatirons team are intimately familiar with CSV imports. Because existing methodologies in the market for importing spreadsheets and CSV files into a system are error prone, it is not uncommon for a software engineer to be debugging a data import, or fixing CSV data. To us, this means that there is something wrong with the existing solutions on the market for importing CSV files.

We are happy to announce that Fuse is the solution to the above problems, and we are looking forward to making data onboarding and CSV imports seamless across the web.

The Problem Fuse Solves

Data migrations are riddled with complexity. Historically, the data onboarding process has generally been severely underestimated. Difficulties in importing data from one system to another include but are not limited to:

1. Data exported from a system can come in any format. That format does not necessarily match the schema of the system to which you are trying to import the data. This perpetually causes a manual step where teams need to rearrange data and fill in gaps to appease whatever system you are importing data into.
2. Validations are difficult, particularly on large files. If in a large CSV, a duplicate email is found, and the target system will only accept unique entries, how do you find the error? What should your data importer do? Do you import the rest of the data, or abort the process? Does your importer help the user identify the particular row or cell the issue resides in? Validations are a key strength of Fuse, and we allow users to see exactly which cell in a CSV file has an error, and how to fix it.
3. The above issues often lead to an inordinate amount of time spent onboarding customers, and support staff is often tied up simply helping customers upload their data. If it is a challenge simply loading customer data into your system, then the sales cycle is slowed considerably.
4. Developers must spend time fixing issues for individual customers, or developing and creating a custom CSV import solution, taking away from other core application requirements or innovations.

With Fuse, customers are empowered by putting the CSV import process into their own hands. They can simply match columns from any formatted CSV file or Excel spreadsheet into the structure that your system allows for. Additionally, you can provide your customers with both frontend and backend validations that allow users to know exactly what data they need to correct in order to have a successful import.

By providing a simple and intuitive interface for transforming data, we help each customer grow their business by reducing friction in the data onboarding process. We believe this to be the future of customer onboarding and data imports.

Who is Fuse For?

Fuse is a product that provides benefits across an organization. As it turns out, the pains of inefficient and error prone data imports are felt across teams. The following are just a few of the teams that will derive benefit from Fuse:

• Developers – It is a tedious task to develop a simple, stable, and effective CSV import process, as traditional CSV import processes are riddled with complexities and issues. Fuse allows your development team to save time by setting up a ready-made and user-friendly CSV import process within minutes.
• Product Managers – Product Managers can save time and resources in the development of processes and solutions to streamline the customer onboarding process and assign developers to more important product-specific tasks. Data onboarding and CSV importing is typically not a core part of your business objectives, and it should not consume large amounts of your team’s time or cause customer frustration.
• Marketing teams – Whether using HubSpot, Salesforce, or any other CRM, the import of large lists of contacts and clients can be made simple and easy. Anything that makes managing CRMs easier is of tremendous benefit to a marketing team.
• Sales teams – Selling your system is a lot easier if you can easily support the transfer of existing data from other systems. With Fuse you do not need to create a separate data import or CSV import experience for every customer or external tool. New customers that are onboarded can upload data in the format they have, and Fuse will take care of the rest.
• Customer success teams – Customer success teams are often the ones dealing with customers that need to upload existing data into a system. Thus, they are intimately familiar with the pain points of CSV imports and the frustration that they cause customers.
• Everyone else – Fuse is for anyone and everyone else that wants to convert data between two systems regularly and without a hassle.