in-app-messaging
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Digital Adoption Platforms and the Fight for Your First Click
Appcues, UserGuiding, Inline Manual and Cast all sell the same quiet promise - software that teaches people how to use software. Here is how a market built on tooltips and checklists turned into a billion-dollar scramble for the moment a new user decides to stay or leave.
Customer.io
How a lunch-break side project for developers turned into a $100M messaging engine trusted by Notion, Buffer, and thousands of other data-driven teams.
Appcues
The no-code platform that turned software onboarding into a discipline - and gave 'product-led growth' its name.
Knock
Knock is a New York-based notification and customer-engagement infrastructure company that gives developers a single API and dashboard to design, manage, and deliver messages across in-app, email, SMS, push, and chat channels. Founded in 2021 by former Frame.io leaders Sam Seely and Chris Bell, Knock lets product and engineering teams ship cross-channel notification workflows without building and maintaining an in-house system, and now powers messaging for companies like Vercel, Webflow, Amplitude, and Clay.
Iterable
Iterable is a San Francisco-based AI customer engagement platform that lets consumer brands coordinate personalized messaging across email, SMS, push, in-app, and web from a single system. Founded in 2013 by ex-Google engineer Andrew Boni and ex-Twitter engineer Justin Zhu, it uses unified behavioral and product data plus a growing set of AI agents, branded Nova, to build, test, and optimize customer journeys in real time. The company reached a $2 billion valuation in 2021 and serves brands including DoorDash, Fabletics, HelloFresh, Redfin, and SeatGeek.
Courier
Courier is a San Francisco notification infrastructure platform that lets developers add multi-channel messaging - email, SMS, push, in-app, Slack and more - to their apps through a single API and a drag-and-drop designer. Often described as 'Stripe for notifications,' it routes messages intelligently across channels so engineering teams stop rebuilding notification systems from scratch. Founded in 2019 (YC S19), Courier raised a $35M Series B led by GV in 2022 and powers notifications for companies like New Relic, LaunchDarkly, Lattice, Vanta and Contentful.
MoEngage
MoEngage is an insights-led customer engagement platform that helps consumer brands unify customer data, surface AI-driven insights, and orchestrate personalized cross-channel campaigns across push, email, SMS, in-app, web, and WhatsApp. Used by more than 1,350 global brands, it combines analytics, segmentation, and journey automation in a single dashboard powered by its Sherpa and Merlin AI engines.