February 2024 Summaries

Knock, a company dedicated to simplifying notification infrastructure for developers, has raised $12 million in a Series A funding round led by Craft Ventures, bringing its total funding to $18 million. Knock aims to provide an easy-to-use API and component libraries that allow businesses to efficiently manage notifications without building and maintaining complex in-house systems. The platform is used by companies like Webflow, Vercel, and Amplitude to enhance user engagement and retention through seamless notification delivery. Knock’s vision is to offer a scalable, reliable, and flexible infrastructure that allows products to maintain a native feel while outsourcing critical services like notifications. With the new funding, Knock plans to expand its team, enhance its infrastructure, and continue developing developer-first tools to improve notification experiences for end users.

Slack apps can be complex due to the need to coordinate messaging content, channel, user interactivity, and integration with your product's backend, which includes managing user permissions and data security. Knock simplifies this process by treating Slack as just another notification channel and providing abstractions that help model Slack concepts differently from other messaging platforms. Using Knock, Slack is modeled as a channel and messages are treated as templates, allowing for easy management and integration through its SlackKit integration. The tutorial demonstrates creating a simple Slack integration using webhooks, explaining the use of objects to represent non-user Slack channels and users to store specific channel data. This setup enables seamless notification workflows, whether sending messages to Slack channels or individual users, while maintaining a central repository for message templates and accommodating dynamic content through liquid markup language. Knock aims to ease the complexity of working with Slack's API and platform, providing tools to manage Slack alongside other notification channels efficiently.

Knock provides developers with a flexible notifications infrastructure, enabling them to manage and deliver notifications across multiple channels without custom code. The decision to build an in-house notification system or buy from a third-party vendor is a common challenge, and Knock offers a framework to help teams make this choice by considering factors such as differentiation, correctness, flexibility, development time, maintainability, and reliability. Building a notification system in-house can quickly escalate in complexity, as it requires managing cross-channel routing, user preferences, and maintaining visibility across teams. Knock's solution offers pre-built components and an interactive dashboard, which can significantly reduce development time and maintain system consistency and compliance. Leading organizations like LinkedIn and Facebook have dedicated substantial resources to building their notification systems, but Knock provides an alternative with its enterprise-ready platform, which includes features such as batching notifications, stateful in-app notifications, and comprehensive analytics.

Webflow, a prominent visual development platform, partnered with Knock to enhance its notification infrastructure, enabling greater agility in delivering transactional and lifecycle marketing notifications. Previously reliant on in-house systems, Webflow's growth engineering team prioritized agility and customer engagement, focusing on Net-Revenue-Retention (NRR) by increasing customer value through effective notifications. After evaluating various solutions, including building in-house and other platforms, Webflow chose Knock for its flexibility, developer experience, and superior customer support, allowing them to quickly implement a pro-quality in-app experience. Within a month, Webflow successfully launched an in-app feed with Knock, significantly reducing technical debt and enhancing their ability to introduce new product announcements. This strategic move not only improved implementation speed but also allowed the team to focus on driving feature adoption, ultimately contributing to increased ARR and positioning Webflow for future growth.

Webflow, a leading visual development platform for building and launching responsive websites, has partnered with Knock to enhance its notification system, improving agility in introducing transactional and lifecycle marketing notifications. Knock was chosen for its superior developer experience, flexible in-app components, positive customer feedback, and excellent support, enabling Webflow to implement in-app notifications within four weeks—a process that previously took much longer. The Webflow growth team, led by VP of Engineering Utkarsh Sengar, focuses on increasing Net-Revenue-Retention (NRR) through engagement-enhancing notifications, which include product, lifecycle marketing, and billing notifications. Initially considering building an in-house system, Webflow realized the long-term maintenance costs outweighed the benefits, leading them to explore external solutions. After evaluating various platforms, including their existing customer engagement platform Iterable and other notification infrastructure providers, they ultimately selected Knock for its ability to deliver a pro-quality in-app experience. With Knock, Webflow has seen increased velocity in product announcements and reduced technical debt, allowing engineers to focus on driving feature adoption and enhancing customer engagement. As they look to 2024, Webflow aims to continue leveraging Knock's capabilities to deliver more value to their customers.

Slack notifications can be enhanced using Slack's Block Kit, a UI framework that allows for the creation of complex messages using JSON. Block Kit enables developers to incorporate text, images, interactivity, and design elements into notifications, enhancing user engagement beyond simple text or emoji alerts. By leveraging Block Kit, notifications can include various features such as links, interactive elements like multi-select options, and checkboxes, allowing users to perform actions directly from Slack. The framework supports the integration of images and videos, requiring specific fields for proper rendering and interaction. For developers, tools like Block Kit Builder facilitate the creation and preview of JSON payloads, helping to manage syntax and structure effectively. Additionally, platforms like Knock provide solutions for managing notifications across multiple channels, including Slack, by allowing seamless integration of Slack messages built with Block Kit into their systems, offering features like OAuth for authentication and built-in UI components for rapid deployment.