PLG'd Up: How Vercel Overcame Scale Limitations
Jul 10, 2025 (6mo ago)
Our Marketo system had become a bottleneck. With over 20,000 new contacts hitting our system daily and Marketo's 11,000-per-hour sync cap, we were looking at backlogs that stretched for weeks. Campaigns couldn't execute on time. Sales handoffs were delayed. The team was buried in manual data work.
We had two options: keep patching or rebuild from scratch. We chose to rebuild.
The migration
We evaluated several marketing automation platforms and landed on Inflection.io for its native Salesforce integration and real-time sync capabilities. No more hourly caps. No more backlogs.
The migration took 30 days. In that window, we:
- Rebuilt 50+ email programs
- Recreated 19 dynamic contact lists
- Designed 8 complex nurture workflows
- Implemented a new lead routing system (we call it the "Sorting Hat")
Fixing the approval bottleneck
Platform migration was only part of the problem. Our email approval workflow was a mess. Feedback lived in scattered Slack threads with no clear ownership or sequence.
We replaced it with Knak's linear approval chain. One path, clear owners, no ambiguity. The result: campaign velocity doubled and the team stopped dreading launches.
What's next
We're exploring Inflection's upcoming AI campaign agent to accelerate workflow creation. We're also looking at data warehouse integration to filter bot activity and enable dynamic personalization at scale.
The takeaway
Sometimes fixing a broken system means rebuilding it entirely. Incremental patches on a fundamentally constrained architecture will only get you so far. The 30-day sprint was intense, but we came out the other side with infrastructure that can actually scale with the business.