Farewell AdHawk, Hello Broadlume
If you’ve been following our blog, you may have noticed a big change recently: we’re saying farewell to the AdHawk brand as we embrace our new identity as Broadlume.
I joined AdHawk as VP of Engineering in late 2018, just before FloorForce joined us to create one company. AdHawk’s expertise in helping SMBs unlock their digital advertising potential perfectly complemented FloorForce’s mission to elevate independent flooring dealers. The opportunity to lead the flooring industry in a digital transformation is so massive that we chose to make it our sole focus. Broadlume is the new, larger company that will carry forward those efforts.
Back in May 2018, the AdHawk engineering team began building a new product to serve the flooring industry: FlooringStores.com. FlooringStores is a directory website for flooring consumers to educate themselves and connect with local flooring dealers. We’ve particularly enjoyed using this greenfield opportunity to build a Ruby off Rails app (leaning heavily into Hanami, ROM, React, and Kubernetes). Over time the admin interface for FlooringStores — where dealers could manage their listing in our directory — took on a life of its own and grew into a new product called DealerHQ. Today, DealerHQ provides a portal for flooring dealers to take the pulse of their own digital marketing performance and sales leads — and it still shares a codebase with FlooringStores.
Meanwhile, our data-focused Insights Team has turned its attention toward helping us scale. With our machine learning models helping our account managers fine-tune digital ad campaigns, we started working on the connective tissue between our software products. Nexus, a Java app, provides internal event-driven APIs to sync data between Salesforce, DealerHQ, and our FloorForce website platform. This approach to collaboratively sharing data between applications built to operate independently has allowed us to rapidly unify our products without deeper rewrites.
We’ve continued to modernize the applications that power our website platform, which runs all of our FloorForce dealer websites and their included features (leads, call tracking, reviews, in-room visualization, etc). One of our largest datasets is the Flooring Product Database, in which we’ve built a collection of flooring products offered by the industry’s manufacturers and suppliers. This is a key ingredient in allowing us to easily create “digital showrooms” on dealers’ websites, so that consumers can browse a flooring dealer’s products with ease before they visit the physical store. We’re continually working to maximize the quality of this data, and to automate imports and updates.
This year Creating Your Space also joined the Broadlume family, having independently served the web presence needs of flooring dealers for over 15 years. This created new opportunities to leverage the best parts of the FloorForce and CYS platforms to provide a top-notch experience for flooring dealers. Integrating systems and providing a seamless experience for customers who began their journey with any of these three companies (AdHawk, FloorForce, and CYS) has been a huge focus.
Broadlume is made up of many pieces, but the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Process, automation, and code are often the key to orchestrating the harmonious operation of all those pieces.
Even as we’ve pivoted into exclusively serving the flooring industry, the possibilities of what we can offer have expanded. We’re excited to build solutions to specific challenges for our industry, and to transform the way flooring is bought and sold around the world.
