The ScaleGrowth Sandbox is essentially a copy of your actual Live platform in terms of Settings and Configuration. It is useful for testing and experimentation of your custom User Journeys or Product & User Experience – while minimizing the risk of introducing bugs or issues for your real platform.
It also comes with managed support, where you can our team to:
(1) Deploy Live → Sandbox
Grab the latest Configuration from your Live platform and update your Sandbox with it. This is a great way to make your Sandbox "catch up" with the latest settings you set up on your Live platform.
(2) Deploy Sandbox → Live
Grab the latest Configuration form your Sandbox and apply it to your Live platform. This is essentially equivalent to "releasing" your experimental changes from Sandbox to your actual Live platform once you feel confident they are good to go.
Simply let our team know if/when you want us to do either (1) or (2) above. For both of these scenarios, you can choose to copy over:
- Settings only
- Email Templates only
- Both Settings & Email Templates together
Our Sandbox offers the ability to copy over a version of your User Data for easier testing
Please note that from the Data Ownership perspective, you always own your user's data – and ScaleGrowths merely "follows orders" on what you want us to do with it. In GDPR terms, you are the "controller" and we are the "processor" – it's up to you to make the call to do this, and you should consider your own Terms of Service / EULA / Privacy Policy.
All the emails will get processed to prevent from ever emailing real users:
- [email protected] will become sb+alice+example.com@scalegrowth.ai
- [email protected] will become sb+bob.fullname+example.com@scalegrowth.ai
- etc.
Please note that [email protected] is a real but unmonitored inbox – so sending any emails to [email protected] will work but they will not be accessible.
You can also give us your own whatever+[…original…]@yourdomain.com mailing list – but please make sure you are running on Gmail or another Email provider that supports optional +anything additions in email addresses.
This way you can actually enable and test Email Templates to various combinations of your existing users.
You will receive the emails to your [email protected] mailing list
Keep in mind that Sandbox includes 10k Emails per month, which should be plenty for 99% of use-cases. If you do decide to enable very large Digests on it to All Users, we will charge you at our standard $10 per 10k Email Booster Pack rates.
Please note that we only copy-over Users & Profiles – not Content – by design. The reason for that is if we copy over say an Event with an external RSVP link, there is no good way to make that external link “fake” – and we want to avoid folks who are testing on Sandbox actually RSVPing to real Member-created Events, purchasing real paid Listings from the Marketplace, messing up the view stats for externally-linked Resources, and so on.
Benefits of Copied-Over Data:
- You replicate and catch all the corner-case combinations of Membership User Groups / Profile Types / Data-Loaded-vs-Signed-Up-users that you have over in your real Production platform.
- This helps debug and catch any issues that only manifest for a particular combination.
- Generally make testing Directory & Search easier when it’s filled out.
Benefits of No Data:
- The main advantage is sometimes it’s easier to start from scratch and build exactly what you want to test.
- If you want to try out a drastically different experience from your Production.
- If you have old legacy data on Production or are not sure of the state of profiles after many changes.
- If you are building your second or beyond sister platform under your brand’s umbrella.
We can also copy-over the user data from your Live platform to Sandbox at a later point. Similarly, we can also wipe all data from your Sandbox at a later point. These are both part of the managed Sandbox service. Just let us know if/when you want us to do that.
