Global Data Accelerates Its Sales Cycle and Frees Up Engineers with Bobsled

LinkUp is the leading provider of deep, accurate, actionable labor market data, updated daily and sourced directly from employer websites globally. Every day, LinkUp indexes millions of job listings directly from more than 60,000 employer websites. In aggregate, this data tells the story of industry performance, global economic vitality, geographic trends, and the way work is evolving.

As its customer base moved from on-premises systems to the cloud, LinkUp needed to meet buyers where they work — delivering data natively into Snowflake, Azure and Google Cloud alongside its existing AWS S3 and SFTP options. This is the story of how LinkUp partnered with Bobsled to modernize its delivery program, accelerate its sales cycle, and free up its engineers for higher-value work.

The challenge

One of the key goals for LinkUp is to meet its customers where they work. Over the past few years, the company watched its customer base — capital markets firms, human capital management vendors and large corporations — move from on-premises to cloud infrastructure. Increasingly, those customers asked LinkUp to deliver its data natively into their cloud storage or data warehouse to reduce the integration work required.

Demand for Snowflake in particular was intense. LinkUp, which traditionally delivered only via SFTP and Amazon S3, was losing deals it would typically win because it did not support Snowflake sharing.

"We scoped out what it would take to support delivery to just one of these destinations, and quickly realized that this was not an easy solve," said Toby Dayton, CEO of LinkUp. "We were going to need to hire 2–3 engineers for 6–12 months to build out the infrastructure, and then likely add a full-time resource to manage the pipelines moving forward."

"Customer demand for Snowflake was increasing and impacting our ability to close deals," said Jill Deuel, Chief Product Officer at LinkUp. "This put some fire under our feet to solve the problem as fast as we could."

The solution

After a short proof of concept, the LinkUp team quickly realized the value of Bobsled. After connecting Bobsled to its existing source in Amazon S3, the company was able to start provisioning Snowflake shares to customers within a day — without ever opening a Snowflake account. Soon after, LinkUp expanded its use of Bobsled to support deliveries in Azure and Google Cloud Storage as well as Databricks and Google BigQuery, and even decided to migrate its existing Amazon S3 deliveries to the platform.

"When we discovered Bobsled, it was an enormous relief," said Dayton. "Witnessing the platform accomplish within a few days what we believed would have taken a year and significant investment of resources was incredible — truly a momentous step in the evolution of our business."

The company now uses Bobsled as the primary control plane for its entire cloud delivery program. Roughly half of all its deliveries run through Bobsled, and it uses Bobsled's visual interface to provision new deliveries, check their status, and keep track of ongoing shares in a single place. "Having a single pane of glass through which we can see all of our deliveries across any platform has allowed us to scale out our cloud delivery program much faster than we expected," said Dayton.

The results

Accelerated sales cycle for prospects

Cloud delivery via Bobsled removed one of the most material friction points in LinkUp's sales and onboarding process. "With Bobsled, we can get on a call with a prospect, provision a trial dataset almost instantaneously, and get the company up and running, onboarded, and working with our data extremely quickly," said Dayton. "It has significantly accelerated our sales process."

Reduced time-to-value for customers

The faster LinkUp can get customers analyzing their data, the better its chances of turning them into long-term customers. With Bobsled, LinkUp can get customers up and running on production datasets in under a day on the customer's platform of choice — greatly reducing the time and resources a customer spends on data ingestion.

Reduced technical support needs

By implementing Bobsled, LinkUp reduced the amount of time and expertise needed in its product support team. Instead of needing deep knowledge of each cloud platform, the team simply uses the Bobsled interface to provision datasets to each destination — and can monitor which customers receive which products, along with download rates.

Freed up resources to focus on strategic projects

Instead of hiring 2–3 engineers to build a new capability, LinkUp can now enable delivery on every target platform with the same support footprint it had for SFTP and AWS. "Bobsled has already paid for itself," said Dayton. "We've even been able to keep our engineers on other high-priority infrastructure upgrades and new data products."