Welcome to Demo Auth0, where we discuss different identity use cases proposed by our customers and developers and how they each used Auth0 to solve their specific needs. If you missed our first episode, we featured our good friends at Vercel, where we discussed our Vercel integration, multi-tenancy, and boba; feel free to check it out here.
In this episode, we sat down with the Mindfuel team’s CPO and Co-founder, Max Könnings, and Director of Software Engineering, Anton Reindl. Mindfuel is an Auth0 for Startups graduate who helps their customers drive business value from their AI and data. By using Auth0, Mindfuel was able to get up and running quickly and securely. Read on to learn about their implementation journey and where they’re headed next.
Mindfuel and Delight’s Origin Story
The Mindfuel team started as a consultancy leveraging data science, AI, and product management to support businesses. This resulted in helping clients build data and AI into their services, products, and internal processes, serving many different stakeholders.
“This year, about $150B was invested worldwide in AI and data, and 80% of the technologies never made it to production.” - Max Könnings, Founder and CPO, Mindfuel. To help tackle this problem, the Mindfuel team launched an application called Delight to bridge what they call the “AI business gap” — the gap between what a business needs and how teams can deliver on those needs using AI and data. Delight is a data impact platform that identifies AI opportunities aligned with business needs, assesses them, prioritizes them based on strategic fit, and builds visualizations and reporting to help ensure data-driven decisions. Mindfuel’s biggest competitor is Microsoft Excel. Just as sales teams use CRMs to manage deals, many AI and data leaders manage their projects using Excel. Mindfuel believes in a future where their product will help customers make the right business decisions and will highlight the impact these teams are creating.
“If we come back to the 80% [of technologies] that never make it into production. It’s mostly not because the technology isn’t there, it’s mostly because we have missing management capabilities.”
– Max Könnings
Founder and CPO
Mindfuel
How Mindfuel Leveraged Auth0
Delight is a tool built for businesses that need to collaborate within their teams. The customer base is primarily large enterprises. These enterprises, especially those in Germany and the EU, have very strict data privacy and protection laws that the Mindfuel team must adhere to, and Auth0 helped them navigate this challenge.
“Auth0 is a super partner because it offers flexible configuration options. We have support for multi-factor authentication, and we allow single sign-on for some of our customers. You can set this up instead of investing weeks of development into those features. We can really focus on the core product and not worry about authentication.”
– Anton Reindl
Director of Software Engineering
Mindfuel
Many of the backend functions that Delight needed, like resetting passwords or changing a person's email or username, were available out of the box with Auth0. They didn’t have to worry about building their own backups or the overhead needed when you’re not using an out-of-the-box solution.
Delight leveraged Auth0 Organizations to best support their enterprise customers within the early days of implementation. With Organizations, they created a secure flow for their business users, set up multi-tenancy, added MFA, and integrated SSO for certain customers—this cut weeks' worth of engineering resources down to hours.
Another feature the engineering team leveraged was Actions. Actions are secure, tenant-specific, versioned functions written in Node.js that execute at certain points within the Auth0 platform. The team was able to build Actions that would happen once the customer approached an event, like logging in. This was a real enabler for customization and allowed the team to add this information to each user’s account, for example, to manage users’ MFA settings and Roles.
When evaluating solutions, the ability to monitor logs and workflows was a priority for the Mindfuel team. With Auth0’s integration with Datadog and a few clicks, the team could see all of the data from Auth0 streamed into Datadog. For example, if one of their users has trouble signing in, the team receives a Slack alert so their customer success team can immediately reach out and help.
Pivoting from the development perspective, Auth0 also supported Mindfuel with its GTM motion. Since they are a small startup that sells to larger enterprises, the sales process is very complex, especially because more regulatory and compliance topics are surfacing in Europe and elsewhere. By using a trusted and well-known solution and leveraging features like SSO, Mindfuel was able to instill confidence in its enterprise buyers and seamlessly adapt to their requirements.
What’s Next for Mindfuel
Mindfuel is launching its new product, Delight Spark, soon. With Delight Spark, the business side of a company can interact conversationally with AI and data teams. For example, if someone on the team wants to increase a conversion rate, the tool will extract information from the business users and ideate with them about more opportunities. This helps extend the Delight product and makes it more approachable for the entire company, meaning fewer Slacks and emails that block the data and AI teams from building and maintaining their products.
If you want to dig deeper into Mindfuel’s interview and hear their insightful advice to other startup founders, check out the video here. If you’re interested in joining Mindfuel and 4000+ other startups that have been a part of Auth0 for Startups, apply here. Happy building!