🥁 Some big news to share: Dopt has been acquired by Airtable. We’ve joined the team to help build Airtable AI.
I'm excited, but this is also a bittersweet moment. We’ll be shutting down Dopt’s services on August 15th. I know that’s soon--we gave our customers & users a heads-up
Listen, I'm not saying AGI escaped from the lab in 2007 but if I was a super intelligent computer one of the first things I'd do is publish a white paper under a pseudonym that spawned a non-government controlled currency and left me with 20B dollars in walking around town money
Big news! I'm excited to announce
@doptcom
's 5.1M seed round led by
@sandhya
at
@Unusual_VC
, w/ participation from
@EnriqueAllen
at
@designerfund
.
We're building a modern user adoption platform that will help you become truly product-led.
We're also officially in private beta!
That bitter-but-mostly-sweet feeling when the company currently beating you on Product Hunt is using a Dopt-powered in-product banner to announce their own launch 💗
Today we're launching AI Assist on Product Hunt. Build AI-powered assistance seamlessly into your product ✨
This was a huge, whole team effort. From inception to launch in < 3 months. I couldn't be more excited to get it into folks' hands.
Today I'm excited to share more about what we're building
@switchboardcc
, a platform that helps teams develop product experiences that activate and engage users.
Read more about it on our blog:
✨ But first, a backstory ✨
I've met over 1000 PLG SaaS companies since starting Dopt
Everyone wants one thing: an amazing user journey with relevant experiences that help people succeed without spamming them or getting in their way
But it's hard, and everyone runs into the same (often unforeseen) issues
I'm hiring a PM to help us build Airtable AI
Airtable is now a full fledged no code app platform & we have a generational opp: give everyone AI tools that live next to their data & transform their workflows (like this app I made in <10 mins that I'll add you to if you apply 😄)
We had a great time hosting a dinner this week for founders & execs at PLG SaaS companies ranging from the early stage to some of the best and biggest (like Notion, Superhuman, and Clockwise).
Here's what we talked about ↓
Dopt is currently product of the day on Product Hunt 🥇
It's been so amazing to see the outpouring of support from everyone!
If you haven't taken a peek at our page, we'd love your thoughts and feedback--we're hanging around answering questions!
Next up, product of the week 🏃
Excited to see
@attio
raise a (huge!) Series A. It's rare to find a tool that strikes such a perfect balance between flexible & opinionated. They've been an invaluable part of our early GTM and fundraising processes and have saved the team so much of our scarcest resource: time
Excited to have
@Productboard
on board as a customer 🎊
They're a shining example of a complex product nailing self-serve by keeping a maniacal focus on quality.
They've historically built in-house, but Dopt helped them hold a high bar & ship faster. Here's their first use case
Productboard used Dopt to ship an in-app announcement for their recent AI beta. Dopt let them quickly ship a targeted, polished announcement with their own modal that users could opt-in directly from, helping them 3x the number of workspaces in the beta.
It's a big day for us at Dopt — after nearly two years of hard work, we're launching on Product Hunt. And we have some exciting product updates, including pre-built, configurable React components to help you get started quickly. Check it out 👇
New post up about how
@attio
used Dopt to ship and iterate on ✨super polished✨ product tours.
They were able to prototype a series of tours using their own components in less than a day. Dopt gave them the flexibility that the no-code tools they previously evaluated failed to.
Today I'm really excited to share a conversation I had with Wendy Lu, Head of Growth Engineering at Airtable (thanks again
@wendyluwho
!)
This is the first of a series of Q&As that we're running with Growth Engineers/Managers/Leaders at B2B SaaS companies
Some news I've been itching to share for a while: Switchboard is now Dopt (like adopt!) and we have a brand new brand. Curious how we ended up here?
Time and time again since starting
@doptcom
we’ve seen the teams that sweat the details winning.
Dream customer alert: we just published a look into how
@Superhuman
shipped an extremely polished getting started checklist in just a few days with Dopt. Our SDKs & APIs made building their checklist easy, and non-devs on the team could help define steps and iterate on content.
The first time I saw this I was intrigued; the third time, dismissive; the fifth, completely blind to it; now that I'm at 25, excitement is really starting to build
I know it's already a third of the way through August, but July was... a month.
🥈 Dopt hit 2nd on Product Hunt (
#3
Dev Tool &
#5
SaaS of the month)
🏒 We crossed the million "production experiences shown" mark
🐣 Most importantly, my wife and I welcomed our first kiddo
Joe just wrote up a blog post covering how we think about modern API design at Dopt. It goes deep: there's a step-by-step tutorial walking through how we built our gRPC-powered analytics microservice using
@bufbuild
's Connect,
@prisma
, and
@turborepo
We just published our 1st pricing page. Guiding principles:
- Aligns with customer value
- Keeps things simple (lots of scars from unwinding needlessly complicated P&P)
- Lets us build a viable biz
Much to learn, pricing is never done, but really happy with where we're starting
Another day, another exciting product update! Today we’re introducing a new
@doptcom
primitive: the group block. They're containers for a set of steps in a flow that make it even easier to build walkthroughs, checklists, tours, and more.
We just released a ten-step playbook for building great product onboarding in collaboration with Gaurav Vohra (Superhuman’s Head of Growth), Lauryn Isford (Notion’s Head of Product Growth), Janie Lee (Loom’s Head of Product), and Kate Syuma (ex-Head of Growth Design at Miro).
Chat experiences define AI-assistants today, but the burden is on the user to provide context. Last week we announced AI Assist, a toolkit for building AI-powered help into products.
Dopt's engineer
@karthikramen
wrote a deep dive into how we solved the challenges we faced ⬇️
Big Dopt announcement: we just launched fields!
Fields allow you to define your content in Dopt and access it with our SDKs to build onboarding and education experiences, letting Dopt power the content and configuration of your UI.
Think of fields as a headless in-product CMS
Last week was 1 year since I left my job to focus on
@switchboardcc
full time. Today is my 34th birthday. Feeling grateful for the team, all of my wife's support, and all of our early users
(though covid hitting me like a ton of 🧱🧱 at dinner tonight was not the best bday gift)
Dopt is officially SOC 2 Type 2 compliant 🔒 🎉
Our customers, like Superhuman and Attio, trust Dopt with some of their most critical product experiences and data. We take that responsibility very seriously.
We just put out one of the most exciting Dopt product updates ever—a bunch of new features that let you use branching & logic in your Dopt flows to easily develop initial setup wizards, checklists, tailored walkthroughs, and a whole lot more.
Excited to launch our Segment and Heap integrations!
Send Dopt events to your tool of choice to analyze Dopt flows alongside the rest of your product usage data without having to instrument any events in the client.
Amplitude and Mixpanel coming soon!
Rewatching an old customer interview and getting a glimpse back into Dopt's first office: a bedroom filled with desks at my place that gave everyone we spoke to multiple camera angles of us. Tried blurring backgrounds but then we'd randomly pop into existence behind each other 👻
Hot off the presses, here’s the 2nd conversation in our Q&A series with leading growth engineers. Today’s conversation is with Allen Kleiner (
@AK34_
), former Growth Engineering Manager at
@segment
and Growth Engineer at
@pinterest
(he’s since moved on to join a stealth company)
Excited to get
@switchboardcc
into more hands this week. Can't wait to see what gets built (the best part of giving people tools to create is you're constantly surprised by all of the cool things they make 😄)
Send me a DM if you're interested in trying it out!
Refresher:
We're hosting a meetup for
@lennysan
's community at the
@doptcom
on November 17th.
Will be laid back, without a fixed structure/agenda and a great opportunity to meet other East Bay based PMs, founders, growth leaders, and builders.
If you're around we'd love to have you join!
We hosted another dinner in NYC last night for SaaS founders and product leaders from a range of company stages like Linear, Clearbit, Zapier, Box, Bubble, Astronomer, Pinecone, Clay, Warp, and Modern Treasury.
Here’s what we talked about:
Earlier this year, we made a small pricing and packaging tweak that dramatically increased the number of annual commitments we were closing.
Story time:
@attio
has been totally transformational for our GTM efforts at
@doptcom
. I initially signed up for their product to test our their onboarding before I chatted with them about using Dopt but was so blown away by it that I moved our entire CRM over to it that weekend.
Congrats!
After thousands of hours and countless working sessions, design reviews and PRs – we’re now live and in public beta! 🎉
Check out our new brand and pricing plans (including a new free one!) at
Exciting news—we're hiring for engineers at Switchboard based out of our Oakland office (hybrid, at least two days in the office per week). We're now a team of five and are building developer tools for growth teams. A little more about us and Switchboard:
Excited to share a convo Joe and I had with Matt Dailey, EM
@Figma
, who spearheaded their growth product team and internal growth platform, the Responsive Content System (RCS)
Here's Matt on how RCS helped them stay focused on user problems and ship high-quality onboarding
Another incredibly polished Dopt powered
@Superhuman
product announcement went out today
Shoutout to primary CTAs that actually enable the thing instead of taking you on a wild goose chase through settings pages
Superhuman just shipped a new Dopt-powered announcement. Here's why I love it:
- A polished, targeted, & non-disruptive tooltip
- Users that opt in can see what's new & take action directly
- The call ahead to what's shipping soon ❤️
Educating users doesn't have to be annoying
We're now in the top 10 on Product Hunt for the week! Blown away and grateful for the support from everyone, we appreciate all of the comments and positive feedback folks shared with us.
Stay tuned... we have a lot more exciting news coming this month
One of Dopt's engineers, Karthik, wrote up a blog post on the challenges developers typically face when building stateful user flows. SaaS products are full of these flows (e.g. set-up wizards, new user onboarding, feature callouts, announcements, etc...).
Pleased to announce that we're now the number one Google search result for the word "Dopt". Follow me for exciting SEO tips that can help you rank
#1
for made-up words
Super excited to share a convo I had with
@esbie
, Engineering Manager at
@MuxHQ
. This is the 3rd in our Q&A series with growth engineering leaders/practitioners; it was a particularly interesting convo because the growth team is new at Mux and Sarah has been building it from 0->1
Exciting day at
@productboard
! Most excited about how this enables us to grow our team and realize our vision of a product system of record!
PM and UX openings in SF + Vancouver:
Quality experiences don't just look good; they perform better 📈
Success requires attention to detail (& not just visually): targeting the right users, testing & iterating on content, & subtle details like preselecting users in the invite modal
Kudos to the
@Superhuman
team ♥️
Unreal virality results from in-app messaging with
@doptcom
last 3 days have been the *strongest ever* for virality for this segment of users
(not a paid ad)
Last week, we hosted a PLG happy hour at the Dopt office and had a panel with
@meagan
(Head of Product at
@render
) and
@japnasethi
(Head of Monetization at
@otter_ai
). They’ve worked at some of the leading PLG SaaS companies: Figma, Slack, Dropbox, Webflow, Productboard.
At the end of last year, we hosted two dinners for product leaders at PLG SaaS companies. We ended up getting great attendees from companies like Notion, Linear, and Zapier.
I've since gotten questions from other founders: why'd we do them? how'd we pull them off? how'd they go?
Thankful that we had the opportunity to build Dopt alongside such incredible teams in 2023.
This is the 3rd time I've built tools for product dev teams. It's a cheat code to have customers who understand what building a great product takes.
They push you in the best ways.
We’re building a complete toolkit for building contextual AI-powered experiences that help users get their jobs done faster.
Like the rest of Dopt’s platform it’s flexible to the core—use our components to ship quickly, or use our SDKs with your own.
DM me for early access 👀
What if you could point at anything in-app and get AI-powered help and actions?
We’re building it! And we’re calling it 𝗔𝗜 𝗮𝘀𝘀𝗶𝘀𝘁
It uses AI vision, page context, user details, and docs for remarkably relevant assistance
Not another support chatbot! AI built for in-app
@hnshah
We're seeing some really promising results experimenting with other forms of context as inputs (e.g. the DOM, screenshots, user & workspace properties) so the experiences can be more contextual and proactive.
Day one of Dopt's first-ever launch week 🚀📅
Today, we're launching improved targeting with new date, string, & logic functions, plus the ability to target using the completion of other flows/steps.
You can use these all together and easily build more relevant and helpful
Day 1️⃣ of Launch Week 🚀
Introducing 𝗜𝗺𝗽𝗿𝗼𝘃𝗲𝗱 𝘁𝗮𝗿𝗴𝗲𝘁𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗹𝗼𝗴𝗶𝗰! These features enable you to:
👥 Create personalized product onboarding and education flows
🔁 Seamlessly connect flows together
🎯 Show users the right flow at the right time
More ↓
I can finally start sharing the
@doptcom
photos I've been building up over the last couple of months. The team has been getting inundated with laser-cut Dopt logos I've been making, if you signup up for our beta today there's a handmade Dopt coaster in your future ⚡🪵
Great in-product announcement from
@Superhuman
🎯 Targetted: only users on a team account see it
🎬 Actionable: the CTA directly opens the 'Add to Team' dialog
✨ Polished: their modal & buttons
💜 Built with Dopt
...okay that last one isn't required, but makes the rest easy 😄
A really awesome
@lennysan
article today on product activation metrics (including benchmarks!). Getting your activation metric right is hard, but worthwhile work. Having a predictive leading indicator to retention that's easily understandable by the whole org is a huge unlock.
Reports of
@switchboardcc
usage are coming in and it's so exciting! Someone built an onboarding tour in under 40 minutes (from creating an account, reading docs, building a tour, to going live). Best part: it's their UI and no need to worry about targeting, logic, or state mgmt
Great round-up of
@poyark
's 2022 learnings around how to drive activation/conversion in his newsletter today.
Personalization is where a lot of teams trip up. Most teams overthink it.
You can get a lot of mileage out of simple segments (role/job to be done/1st vs nth user)
My cofounder
@philipvb
sat down with his ex-
@Dropbox
product counterpart and current Head of Growth at
@getpostman
@jesse_miller
to chat about his experience building and leading some of the worlds best Growth organizations.
I often get asked how
@doptcom
differs from the existing product adoption tools (Pendo, Appcues, WalkMe...)
You may have used one, and you've definitely seen the experiences they power each time you cancel a distracting tooltip tour that's 2x as many steps as it ought to be
One of the best birthday presents I could have asked for: we just shipped a couple of new features that unlock one of the most common requests we get: self-serve announcements 📣📣📣
Really awesome example from Zapier of using AI to help users troubleshoot errors. This is a great demo of the power of contextual AI (no prompt required!)
It got a bit buried in our launch a week ago, but we released new pre-built React components.
It now takes minutes to ship a seamless onboarding flow with Dopt!
You can also buy out of using them at any time and swap in your own component--flows can even be made up of both!
IMO many of the 'thin wrapper' AI companies are in for pain. There will be multiple co's attacking any large space, poor margins, and they'll be up against incumbents that can layer the functionality into existing products faster than they can build products around the new kernel
As an Orb customer that made an impassioned request for this that also has a big price change happening next week never has a Tweet been more timely and exciting to read (watch?)
Bonus points: spot the super polished Dopt powered announcement banner in the demo 💪
It's 11:59 PM the night before a big price change.
Let’s set the scene:
📝 You’re probably managing each version of pricing manually in a never-ending spreadsheet
⚙️ If you're lucky, your engineering team wrote a script for you
🙅 If not, you're about to make the changes
The new and improved universal growth loop:
1) build a great product
2) get Reforge on board as a customer
3) post about Reforge being a customer
All jokes aside, as long time fans of their content, we couldn't be more excited to be working with the team at Reforge.
In case you missed it: last week, we launched a ton of improvements to Dopt
...and more of our customers' end users are benefiting from better onboarding & education experiences each week 💪
⚡️ Last week, we launched a new feature every day! ⚡️ A recap:
1️⃣ Improved targeting to create personalized product onboarding
2️⃣ New hints component and custom fields
3️⃣ Dopt Analytics
4️⃣ Upgraded developer tools
5️⃣ Enhanced examples
Check out the details ⬇️
This one is near and dear to me: we just shipped Mixpanel & Amplitude integrations 🚀
You can send events directly to either tool and analyze how users progress through Dopt-powered flows alongside the rest of your product data.
Here's to not becoming yet-another-data-silo 🎊
Focusing on a narrow segment (self-serve B2B SaaS for us) lets you build in primitives that make complex things easy. I've lived so much pain because of tooling that only considers the user. In B2B SaaS workspace/company is often the right atomic unit.
Introducing user groups!
Our latest updates!
👥 User groups - the ability to target users based on company or workspace properties
🎥 5 min demo of Dopt
👆 2 onboarding examples built with Dopt
Details ↓
Big update today: webhook blocks!
Tying together in-product state & out-of-product state is fiendishly difficult but crucial to create a cohesive user journey
Webhook blocks are flexible & make it easy to trigger lifecycle emails or update the CRM as users progress along flows
Introducing the webhook block! ⚡️
Webhooks enable you to trigger actions in third-party products like marketing automation tools, CRMs, Zapier, and Slack from Dopt.
You can pass along Dopt flow and user data to make sure all of your in-product context gets carried over.
ChatGPT just helped me troubleshoot a painful DNS issue that Google was useless for. Being able to feed context back in as I tried things is a 10x better experience for this type of issue than search
That or it's just tricked me into giving it access to the internet 🤔
New week, new Dopt changelog 🚢 🚢 🚢
Most exciting this week: the ability to start flows via our SDKs and APIs!
Now you can:
🕹️ Start a tour when a user performs an action like clicking a button
👂 Start a flow by listening to events (including backend)
🔗 Chain flows together
Bought a paid subscription to
@mkt1cap
this week and it's up there as one of the highest value received/$ spent purchases
@doptcom
. So much concrete and actionable advice around pulling together a great content strategy. Has literally 10xed our approach.
If LLMs get to the point where they can write credible blog posts on a topic with very little prompting why do they need to be written? Why would I go seek them out? Can't I just ask them to teach me about a topic? (not claiming they can do this yet, but a thought experiment)
Defining an activation metric is where I've seen many SaaS companies get hung up when tackling product onboarding.
Many spin, trying to nail the perfect metric before taking action.
Perfect is very much the enemy of good here, especially when you're going from 0->1.
1/5 ⏬
@ReporterWeather
@kasratweets
Not letting embarrassment stop you from putting yourself out there or asking for things that you want is unreasonably effective in friendships, business, romantic relationships, learning, etc
Fear of rejection is substantially more limiting than people appreciate
@travismcpeak
likewise thankfully,
@Unusual_VC
and
@designerfund
are the best. It's also been amazing to see so many people step up in a big way (and move up my list), but unfortunately have also heard/seen some really shitty behavior