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For our Pre-Halloween October 28th Courier Live, Nate Munger returned to help me come up with a socially distanced way to handle Trick-or-Treaters using Courier.

We’re excited to be moving Courier’s internal infrastructure and eventually our customer-facing APIs to GraphQL. In this blog post I’ll talk about why we’ve decided to make the change from REST and what our plans are for the rollout.

Bluecrew’s Chief Product Officer shares why the W-2 staffing platform chose Courier to scale their notifications infrastructure. See how they engage thousands of hourly workers and employers with multi-channel notifications.

We’re excited to announce the Courier destination for Segment is publicly available. Product teams can now send targeted notifications to users on any channel – without shipping any code. 

For our October 21st Courier Live, Avi Goldman joined me to talk about building Interactive Emails using Parcel.

In this white paper, we share the strategies we have discovered through our work in building direct integrations and explain how to add SMS with Twilio to an existing SendGrid integration. We'll help you think through the various questions involved and set up your infrastructure.

One of the most exciting internal events at Courier is our internal hackathon, named “Dispatch”. As we gear up to host our second hackathon next week, I wanted to share a quick recap of how our first Dispatch went earlier this year and why I think more companies should consider hosting internal events in this format.

For our October 14th Courier Live, Arlemi Turpault joined me to talk about using the Courier API with Postman. Postman is a collaborative platform for API development. Together we walked through our existing Courier Collection on the Postman API Network. We then explored updating and using it with our new Lists API.

Tony Nguyen from our engineering team returned to help me send my first notification using Microsoft Teams during our October 7th Courier Live. Together we navigated spinning up a bot application in Microsoft Azure and connected it to the Microsoft Teams integration in Courier. After updating an existing notification to include a Microsoft Teams channel, we attempted to send the notification to a channel and as a proactive message to a user.

Courier’s Lists API lets you create lists, subscribe recipient profiles, then notify every user on the list with a single Send API call.

Since our September 30th Courier Live happened during the Twilio SIGNAL conference, we did a special stream to highlight using Twilio SMS and SendGrid. Twilio Developer Evangelist Lizzie Siegle joined me for a deep dive of the low code conference application we created for SIGNAL using Typeform, Twilio, SendGrid, Glitch, and Courier.

Recently, we’ve been working on standardizing some aspects of Courier’s REST APIs, such as naming conventions and HTTP status response codes. I thought I’d share some of our guiding principles and learnings that might be useful for your team as well.

For our September 23 Courier Live, Danny Douglass from our engineering team returned to give us an API first look at our new lists feature. Lists allow you to send the same notification to multiple recipients using a single API call. Using our Courier Live Alert example, we walked through creating lists, subscribing existing and new recipients to it, and sending the notification using the new Send List endpoint.

For our September 16th Courier Live, Paul Chin, Jr joined me to talk about Begin. Begin helps you effortlessly ship web apps and APIs on AWS. Paul recently updated his 5 year old LAMP stack Ghostbusters site into a functional FASTstack application using Begin. Together we walked through creating a new Begin application that included an HTML contact form and configured it to send using Courier.

I wanted to share how statuses work today in Courier and some of the things we thought through while building a single source of truth across integration providers. I’ll also explain how we provide open tracking for emails and click-through tracking across all channels.

As a follow up to the Courier Live where Troy and I built the Pigeon Weather App, I went back and added support for sending the notification as a direct message in Slack. Adding this additional channel only required adding the Slack provider, designing the message, and updating our Glitch App to accept Slack profile information.

We're excited to announce that Courier has raised a $10.1M Series A led by Bessemer Venture Partners, with participation from Matrix Partners, Twilio, Slack, Y Combinator, and many great angel investors. This follows a previously unannounced $2.3M seed round that we raised last summer.

Riley Napier from our engineering team returned for our September 2nd Courier Live. Together we used the Courier Webhook Provider to send a notification using an unconventional channel, a BlinkStick Square.

Earlier this summer, Riley Napier from our engineering team joined me for our June 24th Courier Live to help me build a Slack Slash Command to display estimated departure times for BART Stations. We created a Glitch ExpressJS app to accept the commands and Courier to handle the responses. We designed the messages by dynamically generating Block Kit using Jsonnet.

As a former product manager, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed out of college, I remember clearly coming into the role with a set of rosy expectations that did not align at all with reality. I want to share my experience of what product was like for me, and a smattering of the various ironies that I experienced on the job.

During our August 19th Courier Live, Tony Nguyen from our engineering team joined me to talk about my favorite Courier feature, the logs. We presented a high level overview of the logs and dove into the details of each timeline event in the Courier Application. We then covered how you could retrieve the same information using the Messages API.

Tony's first week at Courier, which coincided with the first week of the Covid-19 lockdown in San Francisco.

Danny Douglass from our engineering team joined me for our August 12th Courier Live. We discussed a No Code approach to sending notifications using Courier as a Segment destination. It took less than 30 minutes from setup to sending our first notification.

Shadow DOM is an API for DOM encapsulation. It's perfect for when you need to embed a widget in a DOM you don't have access to.

During our August 5th Courier Live, I was joined by Riley Napier, one of our Sr. Software Engineers. Together we updated the Courier Node.js SDK to support our new Idempotent Requests feature.

Event-Driven Architecture: how it works, why we use it at Courier, and what our experience has been like so far.

During our July 29th Courier Live, I was joined by our Head of Customer Success, Nate Munger. Together we discussed our new Brands feature set and walked through using it to send an email.

Every Wednesday at noon Pacific, we'll be streaming Courier Live on our Twitch channel. Our first Courier Live, where we walked through adding email and text notifications to an existing application using Courier, is available on YouTube.

Observations from interviews with over 50 Fintech CTOs, VPEs, CPOs, and managers on notifications.

We built Courier to make sure nobody else ever has to spend millions on custom communication infrastructure, that our inboxes are never again flooded by a well-meaning developer who just didn’t have the time to implement user preferences or digests, and that simple tickets to tweak the text and branding of a template stop getting stuck just outside the scope of the next sprint.