We’re excited to announce that we’ve raised $35M to provide engineering teams with fantastic notification infrastructure! The round was led by GV with participation from our existing investors at Bessemer Venture Partners and Matrix Partners. “Courier is building the future of notification infrastructure. The company has a fast-growing set of customers with a need to provide the best possible notification experience.
The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) was big news for companies when it came into effect in 2018. It aimed to put more controls on how organizations manage the personal data of their EU-based users. Since the law’s enactment in 2018, some US states, such as California and Virginia, followed suit and passed their own data privacy laws for their respective residents. Companies that do business in those regions now have to ensure they comply with these legal requirements.
As SaaS applications usually collect and process sensitive user information, keeping this information secure is key to building user trust and ensuring long-term business success. One of the ways for SaaS providers to communicate how exactly their users’ data is kept safe is through compliance with security and privacy standards.
Modern SaaS application providers handle sensitive user information every day, from customer names and email addresses to application code and third-party API secrets. It is thus more important than ever for web applications to adhere to the highest security standards, not only to maintain their business reputation and avoid financial losses but also to protect their users.
We’re excited to announce a powerful new feature for the Courier platform: Courier Automations. Courier Automations is a toolset that includes both an API and a visual builder that allows anyone to easily configure logic for notification workflows. Need to send a reminder to class attendees 10 minutes before the class starts? Need to page an on-call engineer on multiple channels until they respond? These use cases and more can be achieved quickly and easily with Automations.
It requires an ample amount of time, effort, and resources to produce great, user-friendly documentation. Good documentation is fundamental to the way engineers get started with a product and ultimately use it in the long run, which makes it essential to both user retention and growth. Building our documentation at Courier was a task we therefore took very seriously.
Hacking the Engineering Process is a San Francisco-based meetup, which opens discussion for software engineers and tech enthusiasts to share their thoughts on leading topics, pose thought-provoking questions for each other, and learn more about how various engineering teams measure developer productivity amongst themselves.
Last fall, we published a post on how despite the ongoing impact of Covid-19, Courier would remain committed to keeping our office in San Francisco and focusing our hiring efforts on local talent in the Bay Area. As the company has evolved, we’ve decided to shift our approach to a remote-first model.
Product notifications should never spoil a user’s experience—they should contribute to it. Otherwise, users are prone to turn off the notifications. According to Statista, 39% of smartphone users who receive too many notifications turn them off in response. So how do you create product notifications that delight a user no matter how harried? Consider your users and their many different experiences as you design and build your product, not after.
The consumerization of SaaS has resulted in a massive handling of PII (personally identifiable information) over recent years. The security and protection of said PII has therefore become central to the foundation of a quality SaaS product, and Courier is no different. In a world where there seems to be a new data breach every time we look, users continuously demand transparency into how their data will be handled.
