Going All-in on Mobile: Welcome Insert to the Pendo Family

Today we’re announcing the acquisition of Insert, a mobile app engagement solution.

When we started Pendo, our initial goal was to build a platform we ourselves could use. Many of us came from a B2B SaaS background (specifically web-based products), and we knew it well, so that was our focus. As we went to market, we invested significant time in supporting a plethora of gnarly web-based technologies. We believe this is what it takes to be great, and it’s been paramount for us to be a solution that every web-based product team can use. This focus has fueled much of our success to date.

And yet, from the very beginning, we’d often show Pendo to a product team and would get a comment like: “this is great. Can we get it for our mobile apps?” We’d say “no” and depending on the importance of their mobile app, that was the end of the road. We had plenty of internal conversations about prioritizing and supporting mobile, but the reality is that being great at mobile required significant investment and time, and we had a web-based product to perfect.

When I was first introduced to Insert in May, I was intrigued yet cautious. The company has over 30 people and headquartered in Israel. I had never been to Israel, and had no professional experience working with remote Israeli teams, nor had anyone else on our management team. Candidly, the idea of a 100-person company acquiring a 30-person remote team is a bit crazy.

On our second call with Insert, I saw their product for the first time. I was blown away. It essentially felt like Pendo but 100% focused on native mobile applications. It allows product teams to create fully native in-app messaging campaigns targeted to users based on behavior and demographic information, which personalizes the app experience.

It requires no significant code or developer time, and the visual tagging and editor experience was surprisingly similar to ours. This was the moment I realized that the combination of Pendo+Insert would be powerful.

Over the next few months, we learned much more and really got to know the team behind Insert. We found very passionate individuals focused on solving the same problem we had been trying to tackle, just for native mobile products. The team’s deep experience in mobile complements our team with little overlap.

Now we start the challenging, and exciting, task of unifying the companies. We have already begun work integrating the products, and the goal is to provide a single platform that will support both web-based and mobile-based applications. The combination of our technologies also gives us a unique opportunity to support hybrid applications, which is incredibly innovative. Imagine a single interface that visualizes usage across your web and mobile product, and then lets you create campaigns that boost engagement across devices and screens. It’s absolutely one of a kind.

Over the next weeks and months we’ll be sharing more about our plans and roadmap for rolling out ‘P2’ — our next generation Pendo platform representing the best of both companies. Join me for our upcoming webinars to get a sneak preview of all the great stuff we’re developing.

I cannot wait for customers to begin adopting our combined offering. I am thrilled that we are now able to help companies that previously we had to turn away. Now product teams, independent of how they deliver their applications, can take full advantage of the Pendo platform. The future of product just became brighter.