Another year has passed, and this time of the year is when we look at ourselves and realize how we made it. At AnnounceKit, we seek ways to “always do better,” so we want to reflect on how far we came for you to do better this year!

In this year-end roundup, we’ll take a look back at the significant updates and experiences that have shaped 2022– all created to better your customer engagements.

Taking a moment to reflect on the past year and share some exciting updates and experiences

It was a year full of significant improvements, fantastic growth, and much joy between you and us. No joy can come out of zero. To bring success and joy to you, we started the year with one– the goal of expanding the powers of our product. As a result, we gathered three infinity stones to complete a significant part of the customer feedback cycle.

1. Listening to customer feedback 👂
2. Outlining a public roadmap 🗺
3. Writing outstanding announcements 📣

Key Updates

Concentrating our main goal of expanding the powers of our product, our effort to improve your experience was our main motivation. With that in mind, our team has grown our feature set with several major updates. And our efforts and motivation finally resulted in a new product concept of creating a centralized place for the customer feedback loop.

1. Product Feedback and Idea Voting

To complete the first step of the customer feedback cycle, we introduced our product feedback and idea voting feature in beta this year. With this development, you can easily create a centralized place for customers to submit and vote on the feature requests they’re most interested in seeing.

And for you, this can help guide your product development and ensure you build the features that matter most to your audience 

2. Public and Internal Roadmap

Without completing each step successfully, we wouldn’t be able to reveal and expand the power of the customer feedback loop. The second stage is the second leverage— keeping your customers informed about what’s coming next for your product and building transparency with your audience.

This new addition to the product creates a better atmosphere for your audience where you keep them informed, engaged, and excited.

3. AI Writing Assistance

And finally, the last (but not least) step of the customer feedback loop— making announcements and product updates. Product updates are the phase where we are the strongest and the reason you are with us today. With that in mind, we sought ways to improve your experience with writing product updates. And our little friend is the result of this brainstorming! 

Hence, we were more proud than ever to introduce our AI assistant this year. He is not only a major improvement in shortening the time you spend writing product announcements, but he also is a milestone of what will happen in the future.

This is something we have been excited to launch for a while, and now, we're thrilled to share the roadmap feature is officially here 🤘

Some of you have been using the roadmap in beta, so we want to thank you for all your contributions to making the final touches 🤝

Now, with the roadmap, you can outline your upcoming announcements on your feed and widget and keep your audience updated on what's coming next!

You can check our Roadmap Guide to get started or ask questions by commenting here. We can't wait to see what you all create with it 👀

We're more than excited to announce that the roadmap feature in AnnounceKit is now in beta! 🎉

This feature allows you to keep a public roadmap of upcoming announcements and keep your audience updated on what's coming next.

If you're interested in trying out the roadmap feature, please comment "I’m in!" below and we'll share the beta access link with you 🐣

Announcing a new functionality that you've been asking for some time - post previews! Now you can preview your post on your feed, widgets, or boosters before you publish it to make sure it looks just the way you want it to  👀

Post preview functionality will help you to avoid any last-minute surprises. Create your post in the post editor, and hit the "Preview" button to see how it will look on your feed and widgets once it's published. Then you'll be ready to go live 🕺

We're excited to announce our new and improved post editor which has been completely redesigned and is now available in beta! 🥳

With some major improvements, we tidied the post editing section for it to be more eye-catching so as to make creating and editing your posts easier. 

We're still working on some final touches, but we wanted to give our users a sneak peek of what's to come! You can switch to the new version to start exploring and let us know what else you would like to see in the editor 🤘

Hey everyone! We're excited to announce that if you have an existing emailing list and would like to send out product updates and announcements to them via email, you are now able to import your user list to your AnnounceKit project 💌

To get started, simply head over to the People tab and select "Import". From there, you can upload your CSV file and select which columns correspond to user attributes.

For a successful user list importing experience, see the steps🚶and beware of the requirements❗️ given in our User List Import Guide.

Great news, fresh from the oven! 🧁 Your users are more likely to pay attention to the emails when they come from your email address. From now on, AnnounceKit will allow you to set up your company email to send product updates and announcements from your own domain address!

To start sending an email from your own domain, you can change your email provider to a custom provider like SMTP or Mailgun at Email Settings first and follow our instructions for setting up verification. 

Hey everyone! We love coming up with new designs for in-app notification widgets, so we've just released a new type of widget launcher called Drawer.

It might be a struggle to always get your users' attention to the product updates. In order to prevent this, we need some elements to boldly stand out 🧍 

Drawer is a button that sits to the side of your web page and opens up your in-app notifications upon click. It is a great way to ensure that users don't miss any important announcements while not interfering with their experience!

Wanna try? Go to Widgets now, select the relevant widget, and change the type of your launcher immediately. It is fully customizable to suit your style and branding!

Modal Booster, who dis? 🤙 We're excited to announce our new modal booster that allows you to highlight important announcements on your website in a modal window, ensuring that your users see them!

It is a great way to draw attention to your time-sensitive, significant announcements, such as new products, version updates, special offers, or upcoming events. You can also use it to promote content that you think will be of interest to your users.

We have great news for you to spend less time writing and more time making product updates. Behold our new AI Writing Assistant to help write release notes! 🤖

Now you can announce product updates in seconds without worrying about writing or formatting them yourself. Just give some keywords, and our AI-powered assistant will take care of the rest!

It is a great way to come up with a beautiful outline and save time writing product announcements. So, whether you're releasing a new feature or just updating an existing one, be sure to try out our new AI writing assistant! The best part is that it's available for everyone to use!

PS: this announcement is written by AI 🤫