Product Management

Nodemailer Alternative: Outgrowing DIY Email Infrastructure

Nodemailer works great for transactional email in early-stage products. But B2B customer journeys demand more: Slack notifications for engineering teams, Microsoft Teams messages for enterprise customers, in-app notification centers, SMS escalations, and push alerts. Building this yourself means maintaining integrations with SendGrid, Twilio, Firebase, Slack's API, and Microsoft Graph. Courier provides omnichannel notification infrastructure through one API, handling routing, preferences, delivery, and analytics across every channel.

What is the Twilio Messaging API?

Twilio's Messaging API enables developers to send and receive SMS, MMS, WhatsApp, and RCS messages at scale across 180+ countries. While Twilio excels at reliable message delivery through carrier networks, modern applications need more than single-channel messaging. Courier acts as a provider-agnostic orchestration layer that activates messaging across Twilio and other channels from a single platform. You get intelligent routing, user preference management, and fallback logic without vendor lock-in.

Top 10 Rules for SMS Messaging

Transactional SMS gives you 160 characters to communicate something critical, and that drops to 70 the moment an emoji or curly quote sneaks into the copy. This guide covers 10 rules for delivery confirmations, security alerts, and payment notifications: leading with the outcome, making your brand unmistakable, respecting the character limit, making the next step obvious, keeping links trustworthy, sharing just enough context, handling security scenarios, getting timing right, offering a real escape route, and building templates that survive production data. Each rule includes weak and better versions of a real message with exact character counts.

What Most People Get Wrong About Push Notification Metrics

Push notification analytics have evolved beyond traditional engagement metrics, yet many teams still rely on outdated measurement approaches that obscure real business value. The challenge lies in applying email marketing metrics to push notifications without considering fundamental differences in user behavior and platform constraints. A notification that never gets "opened" might still drive a purchase decision or prevent user churn.

Video Guide: Courier MCP + AI Coding (Cursor)

Building notifications into your app just got dramatically easier. Courier's new MCP server brings AI-powered notification assistance directly to your IDE, so you can integrate, test, and manage notifications without ever leaving your workspace. Model Context Protocol servers give AI agents deterministic functionality instead of guessing. Connect your AI assistant directly to Courier's platform, get smart installation guidance, send messages with natural language, and manage users safely—all through Cursor, Claude Code, VS Code, and more.

When AI Needs to Talk

AI agents are transforming work by operating autonomously around the clock, but they're creating unexpected communication challenges. When MIT's AI discovered the antibiotic halicin, it sat unreviewed for months. As agents generate insights faster than humans can process them, teams face notification fatigue and approval bottlenecks. The solution isn't smarter agents—it's better infrastructure for agent-human communication that can route intelligently and maintain context.

AI Is Changing How Users Discover Products

Search is changing. Google still dominates, but new behavior is emerging fast. At Courier, we’ve seen ChatGPT become a real source of referral traffic—outpacing DuckDuckGo and closing in on Bing. Here’s what the numbers are telling us.

The Product Manager's Guide To Building Notification Systems: Optimized Automation Logic

Tailored notifications are essential for a positive user experience. Learn how automation tools make it easy to customize user notifications.

The Product Manager's Guide To Building Notification Systems: Omni-channel Analytics

This is part 4 of a 5 part series. In this article, we talk about omni-channel analytics, why analytics are hard for notifications, and what we believe is needed to empower PMs. We’ll also share some specific tips on making the best of analytics data to design a more informed notification experience for your users.