I’ve spent the last few years building products people actually use. Most people know me through Mytherapist.ng, Africa’s fastest way to access quality mental health support, and then OpinionPadi, our user-led marketing research platform. Outside those, I’ve also helped other startups build and ship products through MixedFraction, my dev agency. Across all that work, one problem kept showing up.
The problem that kept showing up
It is still too hard to find a simple, affordable way to onboard users, nurture them, and communicate with them based on what they actually do inside your product.
Most tools still treat communication like a newsletter problem.
Write an email.
Send it to everyone.
… and then hope it lands well.
But years of scaling software taught me that product communication does not work like that. Things happen inside a product, all day, one user at a time:
- A user signs up.
- A user abandons onboarding.
- A user funds a wallet.
- A user books a therapy session.
- A user goes inactive.
- A user reaches an important milestone.
Each of those moments needs a different message, at the right time, on the right channel.
What I actually wanted
For years, I wanted one tool that could help me do this properly. I wanted to trigger email sequences based on user actions, send push notifications based on events, and SMS for the moments where email would not be enough.
And because I’m a software engineer, I wanted something I could plug directly into my own backend without fighting the tool every step of the way.
Then I found Customer.io
It was one of the first tools that made me feel like someone truly understood the problem. It had email, SMS, push notifications, SDKs, event tracking, user profiles, and the kind of flexibility serious products need.
It was good.
But it was freaking expensive.
Customer.io has a generous startup program, and Mytherapist.ng benefited from it for a year. That access helped us do a lot. But once the credits expired, the cost became hard to justify.
That experience stayed with me. I kept thinking about the kind of tool I wished existed:
So I built Trigger Engage
In September last year, I started building Trigger Engage.
Trigger Engage is an open-source customer engagement platform for product teams, founders, and developers who want to send smarter messages based on real user actions. You can use it to trigger any — or a combination — of:
- Email sequences
- Push notifications
- SMS messages
- User onboarding flows
- Reactivation campaigns
- Product lifecycle messages
- Event-based communication across your app
The goal is simple: help you keep in touch with your users based on what they do, not just when you remember to send a newsletter.
This is the tool I needed while building Mytherapist.ng, OpinionPadi, and the products we’ve worked on at MixedFraction. Now, I’m making it available to other builders too.
Trigger Engage is here.
— theafolayan, Founder of Trigger Engage