[HN Gopher] Launch HN: Frigade (YC W23) - Faster, better product...
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Launch HN: Frigade (YC W23) - Faster, better product onboarding
Hey HN, we're Eric and Christian, cofounders of Frigade
(https://www.frigade.com), a developer tool for building high-
quality product onboarding. Here's a demo video:
https://frigade.com/video/demo.mp4. Also, the "Frigade demo
checklist" on our home page (https://frigade.com/#demo) was built
using Frigade itself, if you want to give it a spin. Onboarding is
a critical first experience for software products. It makes a big
difference for customer activation and retention. However,
onboarding experiences often do not get the attention they deserve
because, without good tooling, they're a pain to build. At a
previous startup, Christian and I were surprised at how hard it was
to get right. It took a ton of time that would otherwise have gone
to our core product. We also knew that much better tooling was
possible because we had experienced it in the internal tooling at
LinkedIn, where we worked at a previous job. Established software
companies such as LinkedIn, Uber, Vanta, and many others invest in
internal developer platforms to give their teams advantages like
the ability to quickly build great onboarding experiences. But
these platforms only get built at scale. With Frigade, our goal is
to develop the platform that every growth engineering team would
love to have, but can't afford to build themselves. There are no-
code tools for onboarding (e.g. Pendo, Appcues, Intercom), but
they're rigid and clumsy. They're built for marketers and managers
rather than developers, so they sit on top of your product instead
of feeling native. They're not defined in your codebase, frequently
break without teams noticing, and there are limits to what you can
build with them. Unlike these tools, Frigade uses native SDKs and
provides an API for developers to build new onboardings in code.
How to use Frigade in your product: first install our SDK (React
for now); choose a production-ready Frigade UI component or go
headless; create a "Frigade Flow" in our admin panel and hook it up
to the SDK (Flows are where you set the logic, targeting, content,
and more); publish your flow to go live. Frigade automatically
tracks users' progress through your Flows. Your team can sign in to
our admin panel to see which customers have completed what steps or
input data, and you can use our API to sync tracking events to your
analytics platform, send drip campaign (emails that guide users
through setup), or show product reminders (e.g. "Finish connecting
your data" banners). Frigade leverages server-driven UI, so once a
Flow is live, you can easily update content (e.g. change copy, add
another step) and logic (e.g. who should see it and when) in real-
time without new code deploys. We've spent most of our time
building out the platform with early customers so far, but our
self-serve flow is (ironically) coming soon. In the meantime, our
demo video gives you the basic picture:
https://frigade.com/video/demo.mp4. Please let us know if you're
interested in trying Frigade, we'd love to get your feedback on
what we've built so far! We work mostly with web-based B2B
companies today, and our pricing is competitive with other tools on
the market. What has been your experience with product onboarding?
We'd love to hear more about what's worked well and what's been a
pain in the ass--as well as anything else you'd like to share.
Author : brownrout
Score : 68 points
Date : 2023-03-21 14:06 UTC (8 hours ago)
| jmhakala wrote:
| Congratulations on the launch! I've been searching for a digital
| adoption tool that I actually like for months, and this might
| finally be it. Other tools we've tried have either been too
| complex for non-technical people to use or too UI-focused for
| developers to enjoy working with.
|
| One concern I have, as a European, is GDPR compliance. Since your
| platform manages data, it's likely that a lot of information is
| being tracked on your servers. Are you taking GDPR into
| consideration, and do you have plans for this, such as EU region?
| brownrout wrote:
| Data and security is a top concern. We're currently in the
| process of getting SOCII compliant, and we'll look to continue
| to add more compliance like GDPR, too, which becomes
| easier/faster once you've already completed something like
| SOCII.
| BillSaysThis wrote:
| Why do I need to sign in to read your docs? What's on the main
| page seems nice but before I can refer to my PM or others I want
| more info, without signing up to anything.
| brownrout wrote:
| I get that. Our customers to date have been mostly white glove
| onboarding (read: pinging us Slack to understand how it works).
| We're investing more in the docs as YC wraps up and will
| include those with our self-serve onboarding soon!
| mattlong wrote:
| Congrats, Frigade! I'm on the team at Vanta that is revamping our
| user onboarding flows and really wish y'all had launched a couple
| months ago! Building out the platform to support these
| experiences internally is no small feat and can blow up in scope
| quickly. Kudos!
|
| Eric was kind enough to take the time to send us candid and
| actionable feedback as he went through Vanta's onboarding which
| definitely helped us smooth out a couple wrinkles. Thanks so much
| for that.
| brownrout wrote:
| Ha glad the feedback made it to the team and was useful!
| swyx wrote:
| echoing others in saynig that this copy resonates:
|
| > There are no-code tools for onboarding (e.g. Pendo, Appcues,
| Intercom), but they're rigid and clumsy. They're built for
| marketers and managers rather than developers, so they sit on top
| of your product instead of feeling native. They're not defined in
| your codebase, frequently break without teams noticing, and there
| are limits to what you can build with them. Unlike these tools,
| Frigade uses native SDKs and provides an API for developers to
| build new onboardings in code.
|
| pls keep it and keep going. congrats on launch
| brownrout wrote:
| Will do!
| johnnn wrote:
| Love it. Think this idea can improve onboarding experiences
| broadly.
| noahsark769 wrote:
| Congrats on the launch! As an early Frigade customer we've been
| super impressed by what the team has built and their attention to
| detail in helping us implement it in Replo. Amazing work here!
| sfritz wrote:
| What leads you to focus on B2B? Is it hard to find a pricing
| model that works for both B2B and consumer scale, or is that just
| where you've found initial fit?
| brownrout wrote:
| We actually started YC with a focus on consumer and mobile, but
| we found that willingness to pay was much lower than B2B.
| danfry wrote:
| Congratulations on the launch Christian and Eric! As an early
| adopter of Frigade and coming from having worked on trying to
| implement in-house onboarding solutions before, I can say that
| Frigades SDK and dashboard makes developing product onboarding
| much simpler and smoother, very impressive stuff. Keep it up
| guys!
| lelo_tp wrote:
| Nice product! A couple of questions:
|
| 1. What does pricing look like for mobile? I'd love to give your
| tool a shot.
|
| 2. Why make your docs private? If this weren't HN, I wouldn't
| trust your product or think it was for real given the lack of
| public docs.
|
| 3. When you say you leverage the native platform SDKs, what does
| that mean for React Native? Do you use any iOS/Android native
| modules?
| brownrout wrote:
| 1. We've not focused on mobile right now, but you can see the
| original RN package we built here
| (https://www.npmjs.com/package/react-native-onboard). For
| pricing, we're still figuring that out, but it would be
| competitive with Appcues e.g. free trial and starting around
| $299/mo
|
| 2. Thanks for the feedback. We'll get the docs live ASAP.
|
| 3. When we say native we just mean it's not a janky iframe or
| web view, it's actual React Native code.
| lelo_tp wrote:
| Cool, thanks for the resources and being open about the
| feedback
| WesternWind wrote:
| Interesting. I currently work for a tiny 6 person non-profit that
| has a web and mobile app that we provide access to for other non
| profits to use, and onboarding is a pain point. I reached out,
| though I suspect we don't have enough funds for the service.
| brownrout wrote:
| We'd be happy to waive any fees for non-profits. Send me a note
| at eric@frigade.com and we can get you access.
| axlee wrote:
| Sweet. Any plans for the SDK to support Vue?
| pancomplex wrote:
| Coming soon :) -- we started with React and Vue is the next web
| frontend framework on our list.
| hbcondo714 wrote:
| > Established software companies such as LinkedIn, Uber, Vanta,
| and many others invest in internal developer platforms to give
| their team unfair advantages
|
| Congrats on the launch and for giving non-established companies a
| way to do onboarding! I think saying "unfair" is too strong of a
| claim here though.
| brownrout wrote:
| Yeah that's fair. Probably could have been more clear and just
| said "allow their teams to build new experiences faster."
| dang wrote:
| That's a fair point and "unfair advantage" is a bit of a cliche
| anyhow, so I've taken the word 'unfair' out of the text above.
| luke_cq wrote:
| Congrats on the launch. I've been looking at Intercom and
| considering integrating it with our product, and I hadn't
| considered the issues you brought up. We're a B2C company, does
| that mean we aren't a good fit?
| brownrout wrote:
| I think it depends on the use case. What features from Intercom
| are you most interested in?
| rabidonrails wrote:
| Definitely a pain point for many companies but I think you need
| to have a pitch directed at PMs too. Something that tells a PM
| "you need good onboarding and it normally takes time to build
| that. Implement our solution and you'll get better onboarding and
| access to data you want so that you don't need to beg your
| developers to give it to you."
|
| You probably don't need to convince developers that they should
| use this, you need to convince a PM that this is going to make
| their lives easier (because it makes their own life easier and
| their devs'.)
| brownrout wrote:
| For sure. Right now it's mostly CTOs and engineers who are
| excited about Frigade. The product people and customer success
| folks we've talked to tend to care less about how it gets
| built, and moreso that it's built well and fast.
|
| I like the suggestion you gave on how we can frame Frigade.
| It's a way to finally prioritize better onboarding, and self-
| serve access to the related data, without committing too much
| development time.
| alanaan wrote:
| congrats on the launch! so easy a vc can use it :)
| kitbrennan wrote:
| The product looks super interesting, but it's hard to know if
| it's worth exploring without any knowing anything about pricing?
| brownrout wrote:
| Yeah we can do better on pricing. We're considering models
| based on usage (e.g. total MAUs or Flows) or on seats (total
| devs, PM, PMM, etc). Which would you prefer?
| parkerhiggins wrote:
| If you go seats. Please have an seat management+billing and
| view only role not count towards seats. Team members need to
| manage the tool's access but don't use the features.
|
| MAUs make sense. Enterprise want a linear spend with volume
| based discounts and rollover credits.
| brownrout wrote:
| I think for seats, Figma does a best-in-class job with
| viewers and management. Do you agree?
| fiehtle wrote:
| Congrats on the launch. This looks awesome!
| brownrout wrote:
| Thank you
| jotaen wrote:
| Disclaimer: I'm not your target audience, and I only wanted to
| leave some minor bits of feedback about your home page. The page
| does look very neat to me overall, and I like the idea of making
| it an interactive demo. However, there are some UX/design details
| that I had trouble to wrap my head around:
|
| - The demo onboarding flow is embedded into a fictional website
| (acme.com). That sample website only seems "half-functional",
| though, and it took me a while to understand how it relates to
| the enclosing home page: some controls take effect _within_ the
| embedded acme.com website (e.g. the clicking on the checklist
| items, which reveal content in the right-hand panel); some
| controls take effect _outside_ of the embedded sample website,
| i.e., on the enclosing home page (e.g. clicking on the "See use
| cases" button, which makes the entire page scroll down); some
| controls don't take effect at all (the items of the fake menu on
| the left hand side, e.g. "Team", "Settings", etc. - except for
| the "Reset demo" button, though). It might well be just me, but
| for my taste the overall design approach of the demo feels quite
| "meta".
|
| - I was able to complete the first checklist item "Welcome to
| Frigade!" by clicking the "Mark complete" button. But I couldn't
| figure out how to complete the second item ("See use cases") -
| even though I saw all use cases. Is that right, or did I miss
| something? The progress indicator in the lower right-hand corner
| suggests that I'd be able to complete all 6 steps at least, but
| clicking on it only brings me back to the embedded acme.com
| sample website, so I'm seemingly stuck in an endless loop. (I
| managed to escape, so don't worry, I'm good!)
|
| - I'm German, and I think the ACME running gag isn't as well
| known here as in the US. So I was initially wondering what the
| embedded acme.com web page was about, what it had to do with the
| "real" https://acme.com/ website, or maybe with the ACME protocol
| (Automatic Certificate Management Environment, used e.g. by Let's
| Encrypt). Maybe something like example.org might be more clear or
| ubiquitous? (Although also less funny, admittedly.)
| brownrout wrote:
| Thanks for taking the time to write this all up.
|
| - Agreed it's meta and could be more clear if it were entirely
| for our own website, or entirely contained within the fictional
| website at the top. Will keep this in mind for our next pass of
| the website and demo.
|
| - Yikes. Not great when our tool that helps with usability is
| confusing to use. In this case, to get credit for step 2, you
| need to tap on Activation which has a little blinking blue
| nudge. Sounds like it may be too subtle -- a full on tooltip
| may make that more clear.
|
| - Yeah, I believe Acme's widespread usage stems from its
| inclusion in Road Runner.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acme_Corporation We're trying to
| target a global audience, so like the idea of switching to
| something like "Example.org"
| motoxpro wrote:
| Nice job on the product.
|
| Same feedback as GP. I actually read this comment before I
| checked it out and still couldn't figure out step two. Had to
| come back and read your instructions again.
|
| I think it's probably related to what they put in point #1
| HatchedLake721 wrote:
| I was just Googling around for something similar yesterday!
|
| Looking to begin with a simple native "checklist with videos"
| inside a web app for product training, but without all the bells
| and whistles of a Learning Management System.
|
| Signed up.
| brownrout wrote:
| Sweet! Good timing. Be in touch soon to get you access.
| kukkukb wrote:
| Congrats on launching! This looks really cool. Any plans for
| i18n?
| pancomplex wrote:
| We support i18n through dynamic variables. In short, you can
| define your flow in Frigade and instead of hardcoding strings
| in one language, you can simply pass in a variables from your
| codebase.
|
| Do you use any i18n platform? We're thinking of perhaps
| creating some integrations.
| kukkukb wrote:
| We use Rails's built-in i18n. So this should work, as we
| could just send in the translated strings.
| yawnxyz wrote:
| I can't believe something like this doesn't exist yet. I've tried
| adding other onboarding tools and it's always been so clunky, and
| this really hits the right spot.
|
| Love it!
| pancomplex wrote:
| We were surprised too. We started looking for a solution at our
| last startup and never found anything.
| michaelmarion wrote:
| Congrats on the launch, guys!
| brownrout wrote:
| Thanks!
| nkotov wrote:
| Incredibly cool product, often user onboarding to any SaaS is
| either over engineered (and takes too long) or completely
| lacking.
| brownrout wrote:
| Appreciate it. We don't think teams should need to re-invent
| the wheel here.
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(page generated 2023-03-21 23:01 UTC)