Notifications As Art

Why we invested in Magic Bell

…And Loved By Many

It feels awesome to welcome officially Magic Bell to the Connect family. Another awesome SaaS product to bolster our B2B software portfolio 👇

We do ❤️ SaaS

Read here my interview with Hana Mohan in Connect Spotlight for more insights about Hana and how we met.

👇 The 6 reasons why we invested.

1) A formidable Founder CEO. Hana is on a mission to reinvent notifications and turn into …art. One inbox at the time.

2) An opinionated product, crafted with love, loved by many (yes, our core thesis 100% applies).

3) A SaaS playbook that we have successfully applied: to fix broken experiences and turn them into delightful ones. Emails and push notifications are currently unloved by many: a large and established solution that is not the right answer. Notifications are a proxy for user experience and if rightfully designed are to be loved. With MagicBell products bring back joy to notifications.

4) Notifications are the missing spec of the internet. Given the internet’s lack of native infrastructure for notifications, a side effect has been the coupling of email and notifications, which is polluted both email and notifications. MagicBell consolidates fragmented systems and creates a new spec that let apps implement notifications more consistently. “Much like Stripe did for payments, our goal is to become the standard for notification systems”.

5) Hard problem to solve at scale. Building a notification system is challenging in multiple ways — there is the complexity in understanding and implementing multiple APIs, and then there is the complexity in creating a UI/UX that brings all these components together.

• User expectations are going to go up and a fine-grained notification system (better preference management, ability to set work hours) is going to become a competitive advantage, and eventually table stakes.
• Every app would need a notification inbox running on a sophisticated notification system.

6) A new category creation: centralised notifications. The notification inbox is the future of customer messaging and MagicBell is the first to offer it “as a service”. We think a future around a centralised inbox is kind of inevitable. MagicBell creates a new UX that’s centred around it. MagicBell brings back joy to notifications. ”FRO-TO: from notifications via email that suck and make users unsubscribe, to a notifications inbox that makes your product awesome and users love it.

#saas #notifications #devtools #categorydesign