Sell Us Your Notifications Platform
hardClient pitchCommonly asked~45 minCustomer-facingHiring managerBar raiserSenior / SDE-3RazorpayPhonePeAtlassianAmazonMicrosoftMulti-tenancyQueues & AsyncResilienceAPI Design
The question, as asked
“You're the architect for a notifications SaaS. I'm the CTO of a fintech doing 40 million messages a month, currently self-hosting. Convince me to buy yours instead — and I'll be picking holes.”
Scope it before you design it
The prompt is vague on purpose. These are the clarifying questions a strong candidate asks first — answer them out loud before you touch the architecture.
- Do discovery before you pitch. Ask why they're looking now — nobody replaces working infrastructure without a trigger, and the trigger is what you're actually selling against.
- Get their channel mix. 40M messages that are mostly push is a completely different cost conversation from 40M that are mostly SMS, because carrier fees dwarf software fees.
- Ask what breaks today. Late OTPs, a bad campaign, a failed audit, an engineer who left — the specific pain determines which part of your platform matters.
- Establish who owns the decision and what they're measured on. A CTO cares about engineering time and risk; a CFO cares about cost per message; compliance cares about where data sits.
- Ask about regulatory constraints early. For an Indian fintech, data localisation and DND/TRAI rules aren't details — they can disqualify a vendor outright.
- Find out what 'done' looks like. Migration timeline, who does the integration work, and what they need to see before signing.
- Ask what they'd need to believe to switch. It surfaces the real objection instead of letting you guess at it for forty minutes.
Your answer, first
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Framework hint
Sketch or write your approach above first. The hint gives you the structure, not the answer.