The blog.
Engineering essays, product opinions, and the occasional rant.
AI made software easier to build. And so much harder to use
All the software I used in the pre-AI era has exploded into half-baked feature bloat. I recently decided to look into why this is.
The top ten questions users actually ask AI assistants
We build an AI assistant that lives inside other companies' products, so understanding what users ask it is part of our job. The same short list of confusions comes up again and again, across very different products.
Christian Mathiesen4 min read
The 8 best customer support AI tools in 2026 (and where each one fits)
A practical comparison of the best customer support AI tools in 2026. Frigade, Intercom Fin, Zendesk, Ada, Forethought, Decagon, Sierra, and Pylon, grouped by the channel they work in and who each one is for.
Eric Brownrout5 min read
Answering is the easy half
Today we're launching Skills. The Frigade Assistant can now take real actions in your product, not just answer questions about it, learned on its own and approved by you with no code.
Eric Brownrout3 min read
State of in-product AI for SaaS, 2026: lessons from a year in production
A field report from a year of Frigade Assistant production traffic. What users do with an in-app AI assistant once it is in front of them, and the one capability that separates it from a chatbot.
Christian Mathiesen6 min read
A good animation disappears
A good animation does one job and leaves: it explains a change you would have missed, or points at the one thing that matters now. Everything else is noise wearing a nice easing curve, and we delete it.
Elton Lai-Rego9 min read
How to deflect support tickets with an in-product AI assistant
The 2026 playbook for ticket deflection. Five steps plus the anti-patterns that cap most teams' deflection rate. Built around what works when your product ships faster than your docs.
Christian Mathiesen8 min read
WalkMe alternatives in 2026, without the six-month rollout
WalkMe earns its price for some buyers and overshoots the rest. Our 2026 read on the modern WalkMe alternatives, sorted by which job you're using WalkMe for.
Christian Mathiesen6 min read
Startups are ruining Reddit with AI SEO slop
Startups have started reverse-engineering Reddit posts to feed LLMs. Many don't even make sense to humans anymore. The LLMs scrape them up anyway.
Christian Mathiesen4 min read
The help center was always a stopgap
Knowledge bases were a workaround for not being in the room. An agent that uses the product replaces the workaround with something that actually keeps up.
Elton Lai-Rego3 min read
Design prompting: describe the world, not the widget
We gave two Claude instances the same button to animate, one with a bullet-point spec and one with a metaphor about molten metal. The gap was wide, and not in the direction you'd expect.
Micah Snyder5 min read
Digital adoption platforms in 2026: 10 tools, sorted by who they're for
An honest 2026 read on the digital adoption platform category from a vendor inside it. Six commercial tools, four open-source alternatives, and where each one actually fits.
Christian Mathiesen9 min read
Why I took a physics class as a software engineer
I didn't plan on learning spring-damper dynamics. Then I tried to make a floating assistant feel right when you drag it. WARNING - lots of math
Elton Lai-Rego7 min read
We left Framer (and others will, too)
Code, then Framer for two years, then back to code. Why we made the move, and why most teams running a marketing site on a no-code tool will too.
Eric Brownrout8 min read
How we migrated our marketing site off Framer to code
AI didn't one-shot our marketing site. It made the rebuild cheap enough to be worth doing anyway.
Eric Brownrout8 min read
Two easing curves and no animation library
The Frigade marketing site ships zero animation dependencies. Here's why CSS alone got us further than Framer Motion would have, and what the system actually looks like.
Elton Lai-Rego5 min read
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.
Christian Mathiesen4 min read
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 read
Product 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 read
Static 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 read
The 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 read
Anna 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 read
Elton 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 read
Introducing 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 Brownrout6 min read
Upgrading 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 read
Introducing 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 read
Frigade 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 read
Collections: 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 read
Visual 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 read
Frigade 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 read
Say 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 read
Components 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 read
RSC 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 read
Introducing 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 read
Frigade 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 read
How 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 read
Stop 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 read
Micah 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 read
How 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 read
Frigade 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 read
Hello 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
