How Dan Fowlie Shipped His Marriage Proposal Using Zach Braff, Twilio and Salesforce

How Dan Fowlie Shipped His Marriage Proposal Using Zach Braff, Twilio and Salesforce

So how do you integrate Zach Braff, Salesforce and Twilio together to make your girlfriend your fiancé? Ask Dan Fowlie. The New Zealand based developer built an app, and planned an elaborate scheme to ship his proposal using Twilio SMS.

The Plan

Dan and his fiancée Kate Whalan are huge fans of the movie Garden State and its writer, director and starring man, Zach Braff. When Braff launched a Kickstarter to fund a movie, Dan donated and received a custom greeting from Braff in return.

The game plan was to use Twilio SMS to trigger a call to his girlfriend’s cell phone. Using Salesforce, Dan created a custom contact with a picture so his girlfriend would think she was actually getting a call from Zach.

The Commit

Dan told Kate they were going on a hike into the New Zealand mountains to meet their friends. When they got to their cabin, the door was locked (just as Dan planned).

Dan played it cool and acted like he was trying to find service. He was really sending a text to his Twilio number to trigger Zach’s call. Dan asked Kate “Hey, I don’t have any service. Can you try your phone?” Right, as Kate took her phone out of her pocket, she saw a call from Zach Braff and, in Dan’s words, “freaked out.”

Most importantly — she said yes. You can hear the audio of Zach’s call and Kate’s reaction in Dan’s animated video below.

Now after the big day, Dan is relieved everything worked flawlessly. “I was checking every single line of code twice,” said Dan. When your proposal is on the line, there’s no room for application errors. “It was really easy to set up, it was only 20 lines of code.” Those are 20 lines of life changing code.

Congrats to Dan and Kate. Read more about the proposal here on Dan’s blog.