MagicBell (YC W21) – embedded notification system for your product

Hey everyone! I am Hana, and along with my co-founder Josue, we are excited to launch MagicBell (https://magicbell.io). You can embed MagicBell in your web/mobile application to show users workflow notifications in-app and real-time. If the user is not online when you send them a notification, we can send them an email (or text). For example, a project management app can use MagicBell to show new tasks assigned to a user or tasks due soon. A code collaboration app will notify users of pull-requests that need their review. These notifications keep the workflow moving.

Building a notification system is challenging. We built robust email notifications at my last startup SupportBee [0], and it took us weeks to nail down the threading, reply by email, unsubscription links, and notification preference management. When we wanted to add an in-app inbox, I felt that we were building a mini email client into our app. A well designed in-app experience needs real-time updates and state management (read/unread/archived) apart from a lot of UI polish.

Not only do we save you months of work to begin with, but we also have an extensive product roadmap with features like email templates and grouping of notifications. Your customers will get a better experience each day without you having to invest in the development effort. Apart from customer-facing features, we plan to add a debug interface and analytics so you can get more visibility into your notifications.

Our embeddable notification inbox is written using React and MobX, and we use Ably.io for real-time updates. We offer a React SDK [1] that lets you build a custom interface, and we use Storybooks to test our UI. Fun fact: you can see the entire catalog of React components we offer [2]. We extracted the network layer of our embeddable into a Javascript package so customers not using React can use that to build a custom interface [3]. We'll work on Vue & React-Native SDK next. Our backend is hosted on AWS.

Thank you for reading. Please try out our product and send us your feedback, questions, and ideas. If you have built a notification system at work, we’d love to hear about your experience!

[0] https://www.indiehackers.com/post/ama-i-am-a-transgender-ent... [1] https://www.npmjs.com/package/@magicbell/magicbell-react [2] https://magicbell-react.netlify.app/?path=/story/magicbell-i... [3] https://www.npmjs.com/package/@magicbell/core