Mentimeter is transforming how the world presents ideas. Their engagement tool turns conventional presentations into interactive experiences and is used by more than 280 million people globally.
Mentimeter has seen explosive growth. The company grew its enterprise customer base by 4x in just two years and now counts over 95% of Fortune 500 companies as customers. Mentimeter’s success stems from a core belief that you can unlock better outcomes when you harness the power of together and lead with curiosity.
Initially, Mentimeter focused on perfecting the core "live moment" functionality of their app. This meant ensuring presentations worked flawlessly when presenters were engaging with their audience in real-time.
However, as Mentimeter grew their enterprise userbase, they recognized that users in separate teams needed to collaborate with each other during the creation of presentations.
"We were focused on other parts of the system at first," explains Oscar Albrecht, Engineering Director at Mentimeter. "When we decided to switch our focus to collaboration, notifications became essential."
In 2024, Mentimeter prioritized adding collaboration features to the presentation creation process. Transactional notifications are a standard requirement for collaboration features, so Mentimeter decided the product would need notification infrastructure.
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Mentimeter chose Knock and launched cross-channel notifications in 2 weeks vs an estimated 6 months for an in-house build.
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Mentimeter prevented users from getting notification fatigue by implementing in-app and email notifications with sophisticated orchestration.
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Knock’s analytics tools enabled Mentimeter to measure and improve user engagement.
Deciding between build vs buy
Mentimeter's notification requirements included the following use cases:
- Invites to collaborate on a presentation.
- Comments on a presentation from collaborators.
- Status updates when a presentation has changed.
- Results of presentations, including votes from an audience.
Users would also want cross-channel notifications through email and in-app depending on the type of message, and the ability to set preferences.
Mentimeter carefully assessed the investment required to build an in-house solution versus adopting a third-party platform.
"If we were to build it in-house, we would need a team of engineers and a lot of time. It would be an investment for us, and we would have the responsibility to run the whole platform 24-7."
This analysis made it clear that building in-house wasn't the best option given Mentimeter’s requirements for scalability and time-to-market. This decision aligned with Mentimeter's engineering philosophy to focus their resources on core product development and avoid building infrastructure that can be reliably outsourced.
The solution: adopting Knock for collaboration notifications
Mentimeter evaluated several notification providers including Courier, Novu, and Knock. The Knock team quickly stood out for their partnership approach and the product's advanced notification routing capabilities.
Knock's developer experience was especially appealing to Mentimeter’s engineers, who valued its version control system, unlimited isolated environments, and CLI. These features gave the team confidence that Knock's notification infrastructure was the right choice to build and automate their notifications at scale.
"We felt that Knock was there not only to sell a product but to build a true partnership. The platform fulfilled all our requirements, and we had an open line of communication where we could provide feedback and collaborate on solutions."
How Mentimeter uses Knock
Cross-channel notifications
Before adopting Knock, Mentimeter relied solely on Braze for all email communications. Now, the team uses Knock to orchestrate transactional email and in-app notifications, while continuing to use Braze for marketing campaigns.
This multi-channel approach drives engagement in two ways:
- In-app notifications engage users' attention during active sessions.
- And Mentimeter's email notifications ensure important updates aren't missed when users are away from the app.
Mentimeter notifies users about all collaborative actions: comments on presentations, shared results, role assignments, and workspace updates. Through this real-time feedback loop, enterprise users on different teams still work together seamlessly to build presentations.
Notification orchestration
Cross-channel notifications need to be managed carefully to avoid notification fatigue. The recipients of notifications may stop engaging with product messages or even churn if they receive too many messages. Using Knock's workflow builder, Mentimeter designed an engaging email and in-app notification experience with these features:
• Branching: when a Mentimeter user is invited to collaborate on a resource, they receive a different notification depending on what type of resource it is. Mentimeter manages that logic with a conditional function step in Knock.
• Batching: instead of sending individual notifications for each comment or update on a presentation, Mentimeter batches these updates through Knock, which protects users from becoming inundated with notifications.
• Delays: by using Knock to add delays after some events, such as joining a workspace, Mentimeter gives users time to complete actions within the product before receiving new messages.
• Preferences: Mentimeter gives users the ability to choose which updates they receive and through which channels. This preference data is stored in Knock and is applied per-recipient during notification workflow runs.
User engagement insights
According to Knock's notification infrastructure study, 67% of companies have no way to analyze notification engagement or track opt-out rates. Many teams resort to manually reviewing email service data to try and understand effectiveness.
Mentimeter doesn’t have that problem, thanks to Knock. Their data-driven team uses Knock's analytics capabilities to measure engagement across all notification channels in real-time. This visibility enables the team to continuously refine their notification strategy based on actual user behavior.
Next - Slack and Teams
Mentimeter plans to expand their notification channels to include Slack and MS Teams integrations through Knock. This will enable Mentimeter’s enterprise users to receive notifications within the chat app where they already collaborate on work.
Knock makes it easy to send notifications through Slack and Teams with toolkits, components, and APIs for both chat apps.
Knock’s value to Mentimeter
If Mentitmeter had built a notification system in-house it would have tied up significant engineering resources. Mentimeter estimates that developing notification infrastructure would have consumed 6-12 months of engineering time, plus require ongoing maintenance from a dedicated team.
With Knock, Mentimeter launched cross-channel notifications in just two weeks.
This speed-to-market enabled Mentimeter to quickly enhance their platform's collaboration features to serve their growing enterprise userbase, without diverting resources from core product development.
"If we built our own notification system, it would have taken at least three months just to get basic notifications working and six months to a year to handle our full notification load. Even then, we'd lack many of Knock's features like the workflow builder, metrics, and other capabilities. Cost-wise, we'd need a team of three to four engineers plus infrastructure expenses. Knock was the right choice."
In the last three years, Mentimeter experienced remarkable growth, including a 178% increase in sales. By adding cross-channel notifications using Knock, Mentimeter’s engineering team has been able to create engaging experiences for these new customers without having to manage notification infrastructure in-house.