MagicBell
The notification inbox for web/mobile applications.
MagicBell is the notification inbox for web & mobile apps. As consumers of many apps, we have personally experienced the growing volume of notifications - many of which add to our anxiety instead of helping us manage it. MagicBell is on a mission to end this chaos and help every app deliver a stellar notification experience. We do this by offering a beautifully designed notification inbox that apps can embed in their products in minutes. We do all the heavy lifting related to real-time delivery & syncing, web & mobile push notifications, email notifications, and even notification preference management. We sit at an interesting intersection of a dev tool & a productivity tool for end-users. We are helping every app make its users more productive!
Active Founders
Hana Mohan, Founder
Co-founder MagicBell, and a proud transgender woman. I code, bike, and read obsessively. Passionate about empowering women and other minorities. Previously, CEO @ SupportBee.
Company Launches
iOS launched web push notifications a month ago with 16.5, but there has been a surprising lack of examples to try out. We built WebPushTest.com and made the code open source so more devs can try it out and share it with their coworkers!
For the longest time, iPhone apps needed to be “native” and downloaded from the App Store to utilize push notifications, but you will see that this is no longer true :)
This could be the thing that enables thousands of products to have native like presence, without the extra code, or having to deal with wrappers like Cordova. Apple is notorious for taking tech that has existed for years and propelling it into the mainstream
As long-time HN users, we also included an option to subscribe to a feed of top Hacker News posts delivered via push to you every six hours. It makes it a fun little app instead of a boring demo!
Worth noting that we don't track any personal info (random UUIDs for user IDs, so not even device IDs).
We’d love any feedback or shares. We also did a “Show HN” if you see us there!
Selected answers from MagicBell's original YC application for the W21 Batch
Describe what your company does in 50 characters or less.
In-app notification center for web & mobile apps
How long have each of you been working on this? How much of that has been full-time? Please explain.
About six months, of which the last one month has been full time.
What is your company going to make? Please describe your product and what it does or will do.
MagicBell is an out of the box, notification system with multi-channel delivery. Notifications are created via the API and the embeddable notification center can be fully customized to match your product's UI and UX. Companies with existing email notifications can simply bcc them to a project-specific email address to roll out MagicBell to their users within 30 mins.
MagicBell enables you to think in terms of users and respect their notification preferences, instead of being bogged down by the complexity of understanding platform APIs for different channels.