The blog.
Engineering essays, product opinions, and the occasional rant.
When an AI agent should refuse to answer
AI agents are wired to answer. The good ones know when to refuse. Why "I don't know" is the most expensive feature to build, and the one users trust most.
The freshness tax
Every help article, every onboarding tour, every demo script is a snapshot of a product that has already moved on. The cost compounds quietly, and it's the line item nobody puts on a dashboard.
Eric Brownrout4 min readProduct help belongs where users get stuck
Reactive chat is fine. The problem is what most products put inside it. Better in-product guidance is contextual, in-line, and proactive, and it reaches users before they ever click the question mark.
Eric Brownrout3 min readThe moat just flipped: shipping faster used to break your help center
For a decade, every product release was a new tax on the team that maintains help docs and onboarding. The math has inverted. Shipping fast is now an asset for the customer, not a liability for the docs team.
Eric Brownrout4 min readStatic onboarding tours break. The real cost of maintaining them in 2026.
A no-code product tour is cheap to build and expensive to keep. Here's the full picture of what those tours cost over time, and why the math has changed.
Christian Mathiesen4 min readAnna McDonough Joins Frigade
Welcoming Anna McDonough, our first intern, who's spending the summer with us before starting her MBA at Stanford GSB. She'll be working on go-to-market and sales.
Eric Brownrout1 min readElton Rego Joins Frigade
Welcoming Elton Rego to the engineering team. Elty's a full-stack engineer from LinkedIn, Gantri, and Veeva, joining us to help scale the platform.
Christian Mathiesen1 min readIntroducing Frigade AI: Intelligent Product Assistance
Today we're launching Frigade AI: an intelligent product assistant that learns your software by using it. A new product alongside the SDK that already powers our existing customers.
Eric Brownrout2 min readUpgrading Product Onboarding
ProductOnboarding.com just got a major redesign. Better navigation, a new article section, component overviews, and an expanded library of patterns from across the web.
Eric Brownrout2 min readIntroducing Trench: Open-Source Analytics Infrastructure
We're open-sourcing Trench, the analytics infrastructure we built to handle high-volume event tracking on ClickHouse and Kafka. MIT licensed, deploys with one Docker image.
Christian Mathiesen1 min readFrigade Demo
Re-introducing the Frigade demo site, rebuilt on the 2.0 SDK. Forms, tours, checklists, modals, and inline cards, with the source code on GitHub.
Christian Mathiesen3 min readCollections: Launch Flows without code
Today we're launching Collections, a new feature that lets non-technical teammates ship targeted React-based flows like announcements, banners, and tours without involving engineering.
Eric Brownrout1 min readVisual Editor
One of our most-requested features ships today. The Visual Editor lets you edit Flow content, layout, and copy without touching configuration files, while leaving the advanced view intact for power users.
Christian Mathiesen1 min readFrigade 2.0
Today we're launching Frigade 2.0. A revamped React SDK and web dashboard built for teams shipping in-app growth loops, plus a preview of Rules, our new way to orchestrate flows across categories and channels.
Eric Brownrout3 min readSay hello to the Frigade Figma UI Kit
We just published the Frigade Figma UI Kit on the Figma Community. Configurable design components for every Frigade primitive, so your team can design as fast as we ship the React equivalents.
Micah Snyder1 min readComponents on ProductOnboarding.com
ProductOnboarding.com now includes component examples. Drop-in React templates we rebuilt 1:1 against the best onboarding patterns from Figma, Framer, GitHub, and others.
Eric Brownrout1 min readRSC made our site much faster
How React Server Components cut our bundle size by 62% and improved Speed Index by 63% on productonboarding.com, with notes on what surprised us in the experiment.
Christian Mathiesen2 min readIntroducing ProductOnboarding.com
We're launching productonboarding.com, a curated, searchable library of onboarding patterns from across the industry, drawn from the internal collection we'd built up working with customers.
Eric Brownrout1 min readFrigade raises $3M in seed funding
We've raised $3M in seed funding led by Craft Ventures and La Famiglia, with support from YC, Defy, Magic, and a list of operators who've felt the onboarding problem firsthand.
Eric Brownrout2 min readHow we got SOC 2 certified in 3 months
Notes on getting SOC 2 Type II certified at a small startup. Why we started before product-market fit, what surprised us, and the side-effects of building infrastructure to compliance from day one.
Christian Mathiesen3 min readStop storing impressions in localStorage
Why localStorage is the wrong place to track which users have seen a tooltip or modal, and a sketch of the user-scoped impression API we'd build instead.
Christian Mathiesen4 min readMicah Snyder joins as Founding Engineer
Welcoming Micah Snyder, our Founding Engineer. Front-end leadership from Discord, Digit, and Digg, joining us to build the platform we wished we'd had at our last startup.
Christian Mathiesen1 min readHow to pick a good startup name
The four-question framework we used to settle on the name Frigade, plus notes on the names we ruled out and the lesson we took from naming our last company too generically.
Eric Brownrout2 min readFrigade joins Y Combinator
We're joining Y Combinator's Winter 2023 cohort with Frigade, a new developer platform for shipping product onboarding faster than the no-code tools allow.
Eric Brownrout2 min readHello world
Day one. Christian and I have started a new company called Frigade. We're building toward a problem we've felt firsthand. More to come.
Eric Brownrout1 min read
