The Story Of Novu

Dima and I (Tomer) met at a Cyber Security school. The first time we noticed each other was when both of us finished the first test in around 10 minutes. Since then shifted into programming and then diverted a bit into our respective roles as we started founding companies. We had built and advised multiple companies, and we started seeing a pattern that repeated itself. In each company we had to build a communication hub or notifications infrastructure if you will. Notifications infrastructure is a part of the product code, you can find dozens of occurrences in most products, from emails to SMSs and in-app notifications (like you have on Facebook, Upwork), and many other simple and advanced use cases.

Too many products, but no solution to be found

We saw some excellent products with impressive funnel builders, tons of channels, and many features. Still, the problem was that they all addressed high-level communication such as marketing and very simple product use-cases.
We wanted more control from the deepest layers of the product, to solve the most challenging use cases. The ones developers are called to solve by our co-workers, when no solution is available. Think about that code needed to send a report, handle a mention in the product, or any other type of product-based notifications.

What is Novu?

Novu is the first open-source notifications infrastructure for developers by developers.
Novu relieves developers from building and maintaining their notifications infrastructure, enabling them to focus more on the product’s core features. That can be an in-app notification center or transactional messages sent over multiple delivery channels. Our goal is to solve many use-cases, from digest engine to advanced workflows management, including user preferences, timezone awareness, translations, observability, and many others. We believe that almost every company today (big or small), sooner or later, will have to implement communications in their product. So what would you need to think about when building your notifications infrastructure?

In-App Notifications Center – You might want to show some notifications to the user inside your product, but you could have many different types of notifications. You want your end-users to have the full context of your message, your product is the perfect place for that.

Digest – Imagine you are sending 20 notifications to the user. Isn’t that a little spammy? With smart digested notifications, you can merge notifications into one smart notification, and send it over email, SMS, and many other channels.

Multiple providers usage – Today, companies are trying to conquer almost every channel. An excellent example would be sending a push notification, and if the user hasn’t read it after 2 hours, send an email via SendGrid (sounds familiar?).

User Personalization – Not all users are the same. Each has a different timezone, different preferences, and a different language. All of that needs to be taken into account when sending a notification.

Debugability and Observability -When sending notifications to many users over dozens of channels, we need to make sure the message gets to the right person, at the right time, with the right content.

We have big plans!
Since our Seed funding round, we have been able to significantly advance the development of Novu and grow our team in the process.
But this is just the beginning. We are talking to many community members on a weekly basis, learning about their use cases, requests, and issues they have.
With the help of the funding, we have released a new dashboard, In-App notification center, docker, serverless solution, providers page, and more.

We couldn’t do it without you.
The enormous thank you is for you, the community.
Novu would not be here without you today.
You are the reason we were able to develop and grow Novu when it was just a few lines of code up until today.
With our new funding, we will try to help the community as much as possible, which means:

✅ Use the community feedback to build Novu.

✅ Fund members’ projects.

✅ Collaborate with more project owners.

✅ Give resources to our community.

✅ Feature and promote our community members in every possible way.

✅ Give an unlimited amount of Love and Respect.

So what happened since the funding?

We have released our admin control panel for managing notifications (npx novu init) yay!.
We have created a new website, updated with all the new features.
We started to work closely with contributors and fund projects.
We have sponsored events.
Released our multi-environment support
Released our In-app notification center as an Iframe or as a React component
Released more providers and providers dashboard
Added New team collaboration and invites
Released a new monitor and observability page
Created an awesome registration flow using a CLI 🙂
All in open source!!!

The future?

Support every possible notification channel.
Direct
Push
Others
Create an intelligent workflow for automating your notifications channels.
Add digest capabilities to make end-user life so much easier
Have a new user preference control within our in-app and as a system
Many more to come
Still all in open source!! 🙂

Thank you for believing in us!
All this would not have been possible without the help of Novu’s 40 contributors.
And of course, we are also grateful to our investors, advisors, and co-workers who strongly believe in our vision.

Our values are Transparency, Passion, Humility, Craftsmanship, and Fun!
That’s how we have grown so far and reached our goals and many more to come.
This is just the beginning!
We can’t wait to grow Novu with you and take it to the next level.