Buy, don’t build, your product experience platform

Keeping up with your users’ needs is critical for any SaaS business, but changing your product’s user interface is expensive. Any incremental changes need to be scoped and handed over to a developer, and the result is that, often, no one is addressing issues as they’re uncovered.

The right product experience platform, on the other hand, not only makes the whole process more affordable, it gives the team closest to the problem the power to fix it. By putting in that initial investment to set up your system, you’re saving both dollars and headaches in the end.

That’s where Candu comes in. Candu is the first  UI editor for enterprise applications that allows teams to design, refine, and personalize onboarding experiences without coding, all while offering a seamless product experience.

Candu’s not for everyone. You have to believe that onboarding should be data-driven, iterative, and personal. Most SaaS companies have built some of Candu’s system into their products, and they’re seeing the payoff. 

Candu pulls all of the pieces together that you need to help your users get the most from your software. It’s our attempt to give you software adoption superpowers. Here’s how.

The Editor: Building Natively

Using embedded components, Candu syncs with your application’s CSS to create native onboarding experiences. Unlike WYSIWYG editors, Candu doesn’t render a button that looks like your button; it renders your app’s version of a button.

We like to say that using Candu is a bit like getting LASIK. Yes, you can keep buying contacts, but wouldn’t it be better to fix your vision permanently? Rather than correcting for confusing UI with hotspots, Candu enables you to change the underlying UI that confuses folks in the first place.

Anyone Candu

So, we’ve agreed that a permanent fix is better than a bandaid, but constantly re-coding your onboarding gets awfully expensive awfully fast.

Candu enables non-technical product and customer teams to make changes themselves, without entering a single line of code. Think of it as a Squarespace for your app, where anyone can make updates. Not only does the process become faster when you don’t need to bring in techies; it also becomes a whole lot cheaper.

Continual Iteration

Is your onboarding better today than it was yesterday? What would you change today if you could do it yourself?

Your onboarding is a first draft at best, so it’s important that you can iterate as you learn from your users and evolve your product over time. Candu allows you to easily gather product analytics and qualitative customer feedback, and quickly make changes based on that valuable data.

Want to build it yourself? You’d need to retool your product experience every time you release a new feature.  In a world of continuous delivery, that’s continuous maintenance. The costs would eventually add up and prevent you from building out more features once you realize you’ve spent all of your front-end resources on updating your user onboarding!

Different Strokes for Different Folks

Different users have different needs, and that’s why there’s no one-size-fits-all solution to onboarding. Everything's better when it’s personalized, after all.

Candu lets you build multiple user onboarding experiences that meet the level of understanding and learning pace of each individual user. And, Candu’s continuous user onboarding recommends new features as users’ needs adapt.

If you were to maintain multiple variants yourself, you’d need to—again—dynamically sort your users into segments, build and render unique onboarding experiences for each of them, and also maintain those versions of your front-end. That means fixing code in at least two places every time you make a simple copy change. Yuck! The result is a slower development cycle and, likely, a one-size-fits-most onboarding, which doesn’t actually fit many.

Buying for the Better

It’s clear that there’s more to a successful onboarding than building a system and walking away. While building it yourself might seem like a natural way to develop your application’s onboarding experience, think of what’s truly involved. 

You’ll need to evolve with your users in order to keep your product relevant. That means creating a system that affords you the ability to create individualized onboardings, while making it simple to iterate, experiment, and gather data. 

It’s easier said than done when you insist on building ad hoc. But, with a product experience platform that does it all for you, onboarding the right way becomes a breeze.