8 ms·

Launch HN: MagicBell (YC W21) – embedded notification system for your product

113 points by unamashana 6y ago

Hey everyone! I am Hana, and along with my co-founder Josue, we are excited to launch MagicBell (https://magicbell.io https://magicbell.io). You can embed MagicBell in your web/mobile application to show users workflow notifications in-app and real-time. If the user is not online when you send them a notification, we can send them an email (or text). For example, a project management app can use MagicBell to show new tasks assigned to a user or tasks due soon. A code collaboration app will notify users of pull-requests that need their review. These notifications keep the workflow moving. Building a notification system is challenging. We built robust email notifications at my last startup SupportBee [0], and it took us weeks to nail down the threading, reply by email, unsubscription links, and notification preference management. When we wanted to add an in-app inbox, I felt that we were building a mini email client into our app. A well designed in-app experience needs real-time updates and state management (read/unread/archived) apart from a lot of UI polish. Not only do we save you months of work to begin with, but we also have an extensive product roadmap with features like email templates and grouping of notifications. Your customers will get a better experience each day without you having to invest in the development effort. Apart from customer-facing features, we plan to add a debug interface and analytics so you can get more visibility into your notifications. Our embeddable notification inbox is written using React and MobX, and we use Ably.io for real-time updates. We offer a React SDK [1] that lets you build a custom interface, and we use Storybooks to test our UI. Fun fact: you can see the entire catalog of React components we offer [2]. We extracted the network layer of our embeddable into a Javascript package so customers not using React can use that to build a custom interface [3]. We'll work on Vue & React-Native SDK next. Our backend is hosted on AWS. Thank you for reading. Please try out our product and send us your feedback, questions, and ideas. If you have built a notification system at work, we’d love to hear about your experience! [0] https://www.indiehackers.com/post/ama-i-am-a-transgender-entrepreneur-and-i-bootstrapped-to-over-40k-mrr-9f0f615f3a https://www.indiehackers.com/post/ama-i-am-a-transgender-ent... [1] https://www.npmjs.com/package/@magicbell/magicbell-react https://www.npmjs.com/package/@magicbell/magicbell-react [2] https://magicbell-react.netlify.app/?path=/story/magicbell-introduction--page https://magicbell-react.netlify.app/?path=/story/magicbell-i... [3] https://www.npmjs.com/package/@magicbell/core https://www.npmjs.com/package/@magicbell/core

tarun_anand 6y ago
Kudos for starting up.. These kind of features exist today in many martech systems. Full disclosure: I am the founder of one : www.appice.io but we are certainly not the first or only ones. What sets you apart?
- unamashana 6y ago
  You are right that there are many marketing automation systems for sending emails or push notifications. We are focused on product notifications specific to a user's workflow. The API reflects that and, so does the design of the inbox. For example, the API accepts a category for each notification and you can set preferences per category (one of the categories can be marketing). When adding MagicBell to your frontend, you can write a custom click handler and redirect your user to the specific action they need to take on a notification. A lot of the marketing automation tools also lack an in-app inbox that offers a workflow for these notifications (read/unread/delete).
koopuluri 6y ago
Congrats on the launch Hana, Josue! This product makes so, so much sense. I can recall at least 3 times over the past few years when I've had to build some version of this for my projects and would have loved to use MagicBell. If you're able to share, where have you found initial growth? Has it been on the early stage startup side / enterprise? Also, small typo on the pricing page "engineerrs" in the Business tier. All the best
- unamashana 6y ago
  Thanks for catching that typo. Pushing up a fix now. We see traction with early and later-stage companies, but the bigger orgs take their time to launch since they usually need buy-ins from at least a few people - developers, designers, and product managers. We got some interest from big enterprises, but I need to get better at working with them over the long-drawn process!
troygoode 6y ago
Hey Hana – I love what you're doing with in-app. Congrats on YC! Courier (https://www.courier.com https://www.courier.com) is also in this space, but we're focused on other channels like email, Slack, SMS, MS Teams, SMS, etc. as well as handling orchestration capabilities around lists, preferences, and sequences. I'm pretty confident you & I started Magicbell & Courier for the same reason: we were both tired of seeing this have to be built over and over. Glad to see the space is heating up!

113 points by unamashana 6y ago

tarun_anand 6y ago

Kudos for starting up.. These kind of features exist today in many martech systems. Full disclosure: I am the founder of one : www.appice.io but we are certainly not the first or only ones. What sets you apart?

unamashana 6y ago
You are right that there are many marketing automation systems for sending emails or push notifications. We are focused on product notifications specific to a user's workflow. The API reflects that and, so does the design of the inbox. For example, the API accepts a category for each notification and you can set preferences per category (one of the categories can be marketing). When adding MagicBell to your frontend, you can write a custom click handler and redirect your user to the specific action they need to take on a notification. A lot of the marketing automation tools also lack an in-app inbox that offers a workflow for these notifications (read/unread/delete).

koopuluri 6y ago

Congrats on the launch Hana, Josue! This product makes so, so much sense. I can recall at least 3 times over the past few years when I've had to build some version of this for my projects and would have loved to use MagicBell. If you're able to share, where have you found initial growth? Has it been on the early stage startup side / enterprise? Also, small typo on the pricing page "engineerrs" in the Business tier. All the best

unamashana 6y ago
Thanks for catching that typo. Pushing up a fix now. We see traction with early and later-stage companies, but the bigger orgs take their time to launch since they usually need buy-ins from at least a few people - developers, designers, and product managers. We got some interest from big enterprises, but I need to get better at working with them over the long-drawn process!

troygoode 6y ago

Hey Hana – I love what you're doing with in-app. Congrats on YC! Courier (https://www.courier.com https://www.courier.com) is also in this space, but we're focused on other channels like email, Slack, SMS, MS Teams, SMS, etc. as well as handling orchestration capabilities around lists, preferences, and sequences. I'm pretty confident you & I started Magicbell & Courier for the same reason: we were both tired of seeing this have to be built over and over. Glad to see the space is heating up!