2023 was a good year for us at Knock. We shipped 34 product releases, 4x’d revenue, 3x’d our customer base, and grew our team.
In this letter we’ll review what we shipped in 2023 and what you can expect from us in the coming year.
The highlights
- Knock now powers notifications in production for over 200 companies. New customers include Webflow, Amplitude, and Vidyard.
- We shipped 34 product updates in 2023. From our CLI to our subscriptions and schedules APIs, we continued to meet developers where they work in powering cross-channel customer engagement for their products.
- We added nine great members to our team across engineering, sales, marketing, developer success, design, and developer relations.
What we shipped in 2023
We shipped 11 major releases and 23 changelogs in 2023.
A core principle of working at Knock is the belief that when you focus on what matters, work hard, and say no to distractions, great products can be built fast. We’re proud we continued to live that principle in 2023.
Here’s a rundown of the biggest product updates we brought to market this past year.
Knock CLI: bringing cross-channel customer engagement to developers
If you’ve been reading our blog, you know we care a lot about bringing tooling to the developer (and not the other way around).
In 2023 we took a big step towards that vision by shipping the Knock CLI and management API.
These tools mean that developers can now take all of the notification logic and templating they’d work with in our dashboard, and bring it into their local environment to manage it as part of their codebase.
This also means Knock is the only notification infrastructure platform you can work with from your CI/CD pipeline to automate testing and deploying to our infrastructure.
The vision for Knock’s developer experience is notification infrastructure that feels like you built it in house, and with what we have coming next year we’ll get even closer to that end state.
Workflow builder 2.0: branches, throttles, and drag-and-drop
Our new workflow builder includes branching so you can build more advanced workflows for messaging users. We also added a new set of UX controls for moving around the canvas and adding steps to a workflow.
We also added our throttle function for managing high frequency alerts that need to reach users immediately without exceeding a pre-defined volume threshold.
More notification primitives on the Knock API
We continued to add more abstractions to the Knock API to take on work related to notifications that you’d otherwise be building in-house. These include:
- Subscriptions API. Model lists of users and subscribe them to the objects you manage in Knock. When an object is passed to a workflow as a recipient, Knock automatically fans out to all of its subscribers and notifies them on your behalf.
- Schedules API. Stop running recurring notifications in managed cron jobs on your service and run them on Knock instead.
- Translations API. A file-based approach to notification localization that fits the way you already work with internationalization in your product.
Customers
This year we more than tripled the number of customers using Knock in production.
From consumer products like Bounce, which uses Knock to coordinate a multi-sided luggage marketplace, to FireHydrant, which uses Knock to power critical notifications in its incident response management platform, we continue to see our notification infrastructure primitives used across a wide range of industries, verticals, and use cases.
The best part of seeing new companies adopt Knock isn’t watching our customer count go up, it’s seeing all of the ways in which new customers use Knock to power better, more thoughtful messaging in their products.
Our customers use our batch and throttle functions to reduce the volume of high frequency notifications. They use our flexible preferences model to give their users greater control over what messaging they do and don’t receive.
Here’s a great example from the team at Vercel, who uses our preference conditions API to power threshold alert customization for their usage billing notifications.
One of our favorite data points at Knock is that when our customers adopt Knock, they see their notifications sent per user go down. We’re excited to continue to push that forward in 2024.
Team
We started the year as a team of six. Everyone was an engineer and writing code.
As our conviction in Knock’s product-market fit grew this year, we ramped hiring across engineering, sales, developer success, design, and developer relations.
Though the team at Knock is growing, we’re proud that our customer base is growing even faster. 😁
At Knock we believe that small, high-ownership teams can accomplish great things.
As we grow our customer base in 2024, we’ll continue to look for individuals who get excited about the ownership and impact they can have as part of a lean team, and who bring craft, urgency, and focus to customers every day.
We start 2024 as a team of fifteen, and we’re excited to get everyone together for our first ever company offsite next week. Keep an eye on our socials for pictures. 👀
Looking ahead to 2024
In the new year, we’ll bring the Knock platform even closer to developer workflows and expand what’s possible with our notification workflow engine.
Through the coming growth and product releases, we’ll continue to focus on what got us here: crafting delightful products, moving fast, and delivering value to customers.
We can’t wait to show you what’s next. We’ll see you there.
Knock on. 🖖
Sam + Chris