The company handing product teams the keys to their own software

Every software company runs into the same wall. A product manager knows exactly what a confused new user needs to see on their first login. A customer success lead knows which announcement would stop a churn. Neither of them can put it on the screen. The screen belongs to engineering, and engineering has a backlog. So the good idea becomes a ticket, the ticket waits, and the moment passes.

Candu was built to knock that wall down. It is a no-code platform that lets product, growth and customer success teams build in-app experiences - onboarding checklists, product tours, banners, modals, forms and resource hubs - and ship them straight into their live software, without writing code or waiting on a sprint. The name is a pun on "can do," which is roughly the point: it exists to remove the phrase "we can't ship that without a developer" from the room.

01 / The problemThe sprint tax on good ideas

In-app content sits in an awkward place. It is not really a feature, so it rarely earns a spot on the roadmap. But it still lives inside the product, which means changing it usually needs a code deploy. That gap - too small to prioritize, too technical to self-serve - is where onboarding flows go to die. The result is software that greets new users with a blank screen and a shrug.

Candu's founders, Jonathan Anderson and Michele Riccardo Esposito, met through Entrepreneur First, the London accelerator that pairs co-founders and dares them to build. They picked one of the least glamorous problems in software - the first-run experience - and made it a product.

02 / How it worksA drag-and-drop editor for your live product

The core of Candu is a visual editor. A non-technical team member drops in a checklist, a modal, a banner or a tour, styles it to match the app, targets it to a user segment, and publishes. The content is rendered inside the customer's own product, blended into the native UI so users generally can't tell a PM built it in an afternoon rather than an engineer building it over a sprint. That invisibility is deliberate - the best in-app content doesn't announce itself.

The building blocks span onboarding checklists, modals and popups, hotspots, banners, forms and surveys, empty states, tours, homepages and resource hubs. Teams pull user data from their existing stack to personalize what each segment sees, then use built-in A/B testing and analytics to measure whether the content actually moves activation, conversion and retention.

03 / The AI turnPrompt to production

Candu's newer pitch is "Prompt to Production." Describe the experience you want, and its AI Copilot generates the UI; refine it visually, then ship it to the live environment. The quiet but important detail is what's missing from that sentence - no exports. Most AI interface tools hand you a file to drop into a repo, which puts engineering back in the loop. Candu skips the file and ships the thing.

04 / The competitionWatchers versus builders

Candu shares a market with Pendo, WalkMe, Appcues, Chameleon and Userpilot. But there's a useful split in that crowd. Some tools mostly watch - funnels, heatmaps, session replay - and let you layer guides and tooltips over whatever already exists. Candu sits on the harder side: it lets teams build the native UI itself, from scratch, rather than only decorating a product someone else already shipped. Analytics tells you where users drop off. Candu is where you fix it.

05 / Who's using itFrom ngrok to IBM

Candu's customer list skews toward product-led SaaS: Gorgias, Vidyard, Make, Genially, Salsify, Thought Industries, Writer, ActiveCampaign and ngrok, alongside enterprise names like IBM. The users inside those companies are product managers, growth marketers, customer success teams and designers - the people closest to the customer, now able to act on what they see.

06 / The businessSmall team, focused motion

The model is straightforward B2B SaaS: recurring subscriptions that historically started around $200/month and scale up to enterprise plans by usage, seats and features. Candu raised roughly $1M after Entrepreneur First, then a $5M seed led by Two Sigma Ventures in December 2020. By 2024, third-party trackers put it at around $3M in annual recurring revenue with a team of roughly 24 - a case study in doing more with less in vertical SaaS.

The culture reads remote-first and values-driven, with a set of house rules that includes "Leave no customer behind." For a company whose product exists so software can leave no user behind at onboarding, the value and the product rhyme - usually a sign something is real.

07 / The road hereMilestones

The through-line hasn't changed since 2018. The people who understand users best are rarely the people allowed to touch the screen. Candu keeps chipping away at that gap - first with a drag-and-drop editor, now with a prompt box - and the bet is that whoever closes it owns a quietly important corner of every software company.