I've been working as a developer since 2010. One of the beautiful things about modern programming is that nearly every problem you have, someone else has had before, and you can easily find solutions online.
Either there will be a quick code fix, a plugin to install or a SaaS that solves the problem for you.
I've only ever had one problem - ever! in 15 years of coding! - that I couldn't find a viable answer to: deferred deep linking.
Deferred deep linking is the process of directing a user to a specific page or resource within an app, even if they haven't installed the app yet. This is crucial for creating seamless user experiences, especially when sharing links on social media, in email campaigns, or through other channels.
In some apps - like event planning apps whose whole basis is sharing invite links with people not on the app - it's a core feature.
And the whole world of it sucks.
There are a lot of companies who claim to have solutions for deferred deep linking - and some of them do! - but they are an also-ran feature of bohemoth marketing platforms like Branch, AppsFlyer, Kochava and Airbridge, who can charge thousands of dollars a month for the privilege of using their deferred deep linking feature.
As a developer, I've had to watch my users get ripped off by these platforms. I've also had the absolute displeasure of trying to get support when trying to implement these platforms. Below is a real screenshot of my email chat history with Branch.io's "support", who 6 momnths later have still not responded to me with very basic questions on implementing their own deferred deep linking feature.
Now, I won't pretend that deferred deep linking is an easy problem to solve. It's not; you have to keep up to date with all of the latest privacy and tracking regulations, not only from Google and Apple, but also from governments around the world. You have to tweak your code to work with legacy OS versions. You have to deal with confidence scores, fuzzy logic and a whole lot of other technical jargon bits and bobs that will make you stop reading this post is if I go on too long.
Long story short: I'm a developer, it should be easy for me to implement deferred deep linking in apps. It hasn't been, but it has been expensive, and it's clear that I am not the target customer for any of these platforms
So then I built DeepLinkNow (DLN for short). It's for developers, by a developer. It's designed to be easy to implement, easy to use, and easy to understand. It's a team of one, and I'm not going to be able to give you 24/7 support. But I will give you a platform that works, and works well, and because it's a one-man show it will cost you a fraction of the price of VC-backed, marketing platform giants will.
Values mean nothing unless they are backed up by trade-offs. "Integrity", "Honesty", "Transparency" are all well and good, but they mean nothing if they aren't backed up by explicit identification of what it means you won't do.
Value: Developer first. I'm a developer, and I'm going to build the platform in a way that I think is easy to understand and easy to implement.
Trade-off: It might not be your marketing manager's first choice, because DLN isn't marketer-focussed. But the side benefit here is that you can BYO CRM that your marketing manager already loves, and integrate it with DLN very easily (article incoming!)
Value: Privacy second. (because developer experience comes first). If you have an ad blocker or Adguard set up, you will have noticed that you have to disable it when you go to branch.io or appsflyer.com. You will see that Branch's tracking APIs are some of the most violent and aggressive on the web, because their whole platform is built on tracking users. DLN isn't like htis. We don't track ANYTHING - just an anonymised fingerprint from a web visit that can be matched to an anonymised fingerprint from an app installation.
Trade-off: We don't have user journeys. We don't have funnels. We don't have attribution. We don't have any of the shiny marketing features that other platforms offer.
Value: This a small business, with small business values. Personal service, genuine not-AI-generated emails, a name and a face. It will cost neither an arm nor a leg (maybe a hair).
Trade-off: I'm not able to provide 24/7 support, but hell, neither does anyone else.
I'm opening up the platform to public beta this week, and I'm excited to see the different ways people use it.