We raised a 5.1M seed to help you build better onboarding and engagement flows
Alon Bartur- September 20, 2022
- 4 min read
Product onboarding matters more than ever
The way people buy software has changed. Spoiled by easy access to great products everywhere else in their lives, they now demand much more of the tools they use at work. Companies slow to recognize this have been caught on their heels, overrun by competitors that are easier to use and try. It’s no surprise that the SaaS world is positively abuzz with think pieces about product-led growth. It’s become existential.
Being “product-led” is far more than just slapping a self-serve signup flow onto your product. The whole company needs to be singularly focused on the full journey that people take to get value and, crucially, the product itself must take up the mantle of connecting people to that value.
There’s a reason the most successful product-led companies like Slack, Figma, and Linear have onboarding and engagement flows so good people tweet about them.
Great self-serve flows mean more people adopt your product, more people stick around, and your business grows faster.
And yet so many of the onboarding and engagement flows in the world are the same cookie-cutter tooltip tours over and over and over again. Afterthoughts.
We need better tools to build better onboarding
Today, if you’re working on a product onboarding or engagement flow, there are two paths you can take:
- Reach for a 3rd party digital adoption platform (“DAP” for short) like Pendo or Appcues
- Build it yourself
The 3rd party DAPs let non-developers bolt modals and tooltips onto products but come with huge costs: they stick out like sore thumbs, don’t integrate well with the rest of your product and data stack, don’t scale, and break constantly. In the hundreds of conversations we’ve had with modern product, growth, and engineering teams since starting Dopt, we’ve heard overwhelming discontent for them. It’s no surprise really, in this new world where companies win and lose based on the quality of their experience they just don’t cut it anymore.
So companies build. But knowing how to drive adoption is hard. There’s so much you could improve—onboarding of course—but also other key moments: the flow a collaborator sees when they get invited, a flow that brings a developer in to set up a key integration, a flow that helps someone discover a deeper capability as they hit an early moment of success, literally hundreds of flows exist across each product that can make the difference between success and failure.
With so much possibility the only way to succeed is to build fast, learn fast, and constantly improve. But everyone ends up going too slow. Why?
- The logic and targeting of these flows is complicated
- To learn what works for your product they need to change often, that rapid pace means there’s often no time to invest in quality and they’re a mess in code
- Teams want to build flows tailored by role, plan, use case, or past behavior but can’t—that customer data is spread around, expensive to integrate, and hard to build product experiences with. Instead, they end up with one-size-fits all experiences that underperform.
- All of this makes collaborating painful. Complex flow charts get created to map out requirements and immediately get stale. No one can understand what people are actually experiencing in their products, let alone work to improve it.
As founders, we’ve lived this pain for over a decade while building and leading product, design, and engineering teams at companies like Dropbox, Amplitude, Productboard, and Patreon. We’ve seen how time consuming building an onboarding checklist is, but also how it can literally double trial activation. And we’ve seen how powerful internal platforms that simplify building and speed up iteration can be.
We saw that the way people approached building onboarding and engagement flows was changing, but the tools weren’t keeping up. Until now.
Dopt will help you develop amazing self-serve product experiences
Dopt is a modern user adoption platform built for PMs and developers.
We’re coming at the problem in a fundamentally different way. Instead of building yet another underwhelming tooltip factory, we’re arming you, the builders, with tools that let you create the best onboarding and engagement flows for your product in hours instead of months:
- A visual flow builder lets your whole team use your customer data to target your flows and drag, drop, and connect blocks to define their logic and branches.
- SDKs and APIs that fit into your development workflow and let you build any experience you dream up using your own design system and components. You get simple tools to access and progress user flow state that keep your code clean. Dopt handles the complex flow logic and targeting using customer data for you.
- A central platform makes it possible for everyone to see all of your product’s most important flows, understand what’s working and what’s not, and better work together to improve them.
We’re now in private beta
Starting today you can use Dopt to build the interactive, contextual onboarding and engagement flows you’ve always dreamed of.
Building a collaboration tool? Dev-tool? Dashboard? Chat? Not a problem. You can use Dopt to build flows that feel like your product because they are your product; flows that help people get successful with your product by using your product, not clicking through a tour.
Like Cycle, maybe you’re building onboarding and activation prompts into your product for the first time. Dopt is helping them build their flows faster.
Or you want to tailor your onboarding checklist to make your product easier to use for multiple personas or use cases. Dopt can help you build complex flows that rely on customer data more easily.
Or, like Gorgias, you’re trying to pull key setup moments into a contextual wizard to get people purchasing your paid add-on to activate successfully. Dopt is helping them build a better experience, one that helps users do instead of taking them on a wild tooltip goose chase.
Upsells, feature announcements, invitation acceptance flows, empty states, launchers, hotspots, contextual panes, and, yes, modals and tooltips too—the sky’s the limit on the flows that Dopt can help you build faster, easier, and better.
And this is just the beginning, we’ll be layering a lot more power into the product in the coming months. New logic and timing blocks that allow you to orchestrate your most important user flows (like an end-to-end trial experience). Custom properties that let non-developers self-serve on content and UI configuration so you can experiment with new flows faster. Webhook blocks that let you integrate your email provider and create truly cohesive experiences in and out of your product.
Dopt is building the platform that will help you become truly product-led. One that helps you move faster, learn faster, and raise the bar on your most important onboarding and engagement flows. One that helps your business scale and that scales with you.
If you want more people to adopt your product, sign up for free today. We’d love to hear from you!
We raised a $5.1M seed to help you build better self-service products
When we set out to find investors we looked for people that saw the world the same way we did. Sandhya Hegde from Unusual Ventures led our round and has championed the benefits of being product-led for years, having helped grow Amplitude through its direct listing last year. Enrique Allen from Designer Fund participated, he’s invested in many category-defining product-led companies (like Stripe and Gusto) and believes deeply in our thesis that the most usable products win.
They’re joined by a group of angels that have set the bar for what great product-led businesses look like: Ian Taylor (Co-founder, Segment), Curtis Liu (Co-founder and CTO, Amplitude), Lauryn Isford (Head of growth, Airtable), Wendy Lu (Head of growth engineering, Airtable), Hubert Palan (CEO, Productboard), Jesse Miller (Head of growth, Postman), Andrew Miklas (Co-founder, PagerDuty), plus many more.
Come join us
Excited about our mission to help rid the world of bad self-serve products (we are too)? We’re hiring a developer relations engineer and a software engineer. Not a fit for either role? We’d still love to hear from you. You can learn more about working at Dopt on our careers page. Send us a note at careers@dopt.com if you’re interested in getting to know the team.