Photo by rachel baskerville on Unsplash Someone new has agreed to join your company, and they’ve signed your offer letter. You’re thrilled! You’re going to spend the next few weeks focusing on making sure their first day is a great one, prepping their onboarding materials, and making sure they’re ready to “hit th…

Recently at Customer.io, we released a Layout Starters feature. What began as a hack project at our recent Iceland retreat grew into a full-fledged piece of product work, along with a new suite of documentation. We’re pretty proud of it and wanted to share! This post digs into both UX process and front-end, and comes …

Background Our most recent cycle of work at Customer.io was an eventful one. We were in the middle of hiring for several positions, not least of which was a Director of Product — welcome, Brian! As a result, our product team was really light on personnel. We had: Our CEO, ColinFront-end engineers Kate and NajwaUX d…

What winners look like. Team pink from the “Ami-zing race” at our last company get together. Deciding early on who you serve determines whether you’re a product-led company or a sales-led company. If you decide to take on big enterprise clients, a few of whom make up most of your revenue, you’re building a sales-le…

To get Customer.io off the ground in May 2012, we raised $125k in small checks from friends and family plus two angel investors. At the time of that investment, our total capital raised was equivalent to two hundred and eight times (20,833% of) our current annual revenue run rate (ARR). Our strap ratio peaked on our f…

TL;DR: I wanted to write pure HTML forms without having to write the form backend. I selected FormKeep in conjunction with our static site generators to create a lean, clean workflow. Having to write a form back end sucks. In hacking around on the web for more than 15 years, I’ve built countless bespoke lan…

Every startup needs money to get started, whether it comes from outside the business or from the founders. But ideologically sticking to either bootstrapping or fundraising can be harmful to your business because of how they impact the way you use capital. Bootstrapping can prevent you from making decisions that h…

The job application process can be a black hole. You’re shouting into the abyss… Thiiiiiiis iiiiiiiiis whyyyyyyyyyyYooooooou shoooooould hiiiiiiiiire meeeeeee! Messages that you do get from so many companies are minimal and coldly transactional. They typically promise to contact you — if you’re a good match for…

Radios, checkboxes, and the nuances of copy: the building of another Customer.io feature When customers build messaging campaigns in Customer.io, they have fine-grained control over when people enter those campaigns. But until now, we didn’t offer the same control for when people should leave a campaign, and stop rece…

Some UX thoughts on building a big feature At Customer.io, I work on an app which helps businesses make their communication (email and otherwise) more human. In short, they send us data on what their users are doing, and we enable them to send messaging based on that data. Their communication is actually relevant…