Velvet
p/velvet-3
AI Gateway & Platform
Emma Lawler
Velvet — App onboarding for growth teams
Featured
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Create accounts and accept payments on day one. Optimize your conversion and retention, and save months of development time. 🔮 Join today for early access 🎟️ Authentication, payments, data 💻 Hosted checkout pages 📱 SDK
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Emma Lawler
We’re Emma and Chris, the makers of Velvet 👋 We’ve spent the last decade building app infrastructure at companies like Fitbit, MongoDB, and our own startups. Now we’re building the cross-platform tooling we’ve always wanted to use–supporting trusted accounts, payments, and identity out-of-the-box. Startups lose revenue when they fail to effectively onboard and retain customers. And as a consumer, you have almost no control over your online identity–resulting in a sea of high-friction transactions and lost personal data. Industry-wide app monetization is abysmal. Conversion to paid is less than 5%, 30-day retention is less than 13%, and average lifetime value is just $5.30. To survive as a startup in today’s market, these vital metrics are more important than ever before. Use Velvet’s hosted checkout pages and SDK to seamlessly authenticate users and accept payments. Join today for early access, and please let us know what you think!
Madelin Woods
This will save so much time building that first core component of any app. Looking forward to trying it out! Congrats team 🎉
Emma Lawler
@madw thank you!! Let us know if you have any particular features you'd like to see supported.
André J
Will apple app-store allow this? How does that work? Or is this for web apps only?
Emma Lawler
@eonpilot - Great question. We're starting with web, allowing people to authenticate users or accept payments from any link. From there, a user can download an iOS app and log into their account (which may already have an active subscription attached to it from web checkout). With our cross-platform native SDK, a user who is converted for the first time within an iOS app would include the 15-30% Apple tax. We'll be sure to stay compliant with Apple and Google as it's most efficient for merchants to convert end users at the point of highest intent - which is often inside of an iOS app.
Brooke O'Brien
Sounds very cool!!! Congrats on the launch! 👏🏼
Emma Lawler
@brooke_o_brien Thanks for the support!
Andrew Bass
Congrats on the launch! I can't wait to use something built by the genius dev that is @chris_hendel - I just signed up for Velvet 💪🎉
Chris Hendel
@andrew_w_bass Thanks Andrew!
Soheil
I have never seen an all-in-1 solution for on-boarding, authentication and payments. Congratulations on the launch, excited to try this out.
Emma Lawler
@soheil_hm thanks for following!
Michael DAWANT
Congrats for the launch ! I would love to test this for authentication between our web Dashboard and our app.
Chris Hendel
@michael_dawant1 Thanks Michael! Sounds like the future SDK would be the best way to integrate the two - we'd love to keep in touch and let you know once it is ready.
srprs
Awesome launch, Emma and Chris! I can't wait to give your hosted checkout pages and SDK a try, and see how they can help me authenticate users and accept payments seamlessly. Keep up the fantastic work!
Emma Lawler
@srprs thanks! Excited for you to try it out soon.
Sean Jackson
As someone that has created several in-app subscription apps, I am interested in your approach. We currently use RevenueCat so familiar with the challenge your are tackling. When will you publish your SDK specs? Beyond native code (SwiftUI and Kotlin), will you also support React Native and other languages as well? Finally, are you incorporating in PayWall page design for A/B testing messages and offers for signup? I know you are early in the process and any development details you can share would be appreciated.
Chris Hendel
@sean_jackson5 Thanks for checking Velvet out Sean! We're still early on the SDK front (dog-fooding it with the hosted pages experience we're launching) and would love to hear the pain points you've had in the subscription app space in the past so we can be sure we're building in the right direction for your needs. The foundation is andAPI that any client can consume. We'll be building better developer experience via SDK client libraries as we go, and early partners needs are going to shape a lot of that roadmap. Swift/Kotlin/React Native/Web are all things we want to tackle so Velvet can be fully cross-platform. Yes - we're talking a lot about auth and payments today but that's just a slice of what Velvet can do. We want to help customers with growth via customer acquisition, revenue expansion, reducing churn, etc. A/B testing different offerings helps with that mission for sure. Please reach out if you'd like to dive in deeper - would be great to have an early partner that's experienced what's out there and knows what they need going forward.
Shubham Pratap Singh
Congratulations on the launch🎉. !!
Emma Lawler
@shubham_pratap thanks! Please let us know what you think!
Shubham Pratap Singh
@emmalawler24 quick question, after authentication is it possible to restrict users to access certain page on application if they have not paid, like a membership app? Also sdk will work on react js?
Chris Hendel
@emmalawler24 @shubham_pratap yes, we'll be providing controls to combine authentication with access-control permissions to certain content - memberships are a primary use case! A React client library is on the roadmap. Reach out if you'd like to discuss more implementation details so we can make sure we're building in the right direction for your needs.
Hugo DEVEZE 🏴‍☠️
Hey ! What was your process of creation ? Did you co-create with potential users ?
Emma Lawler
@devezehugo - Hey! Yep, good question - we've done a ton of user research over the past year, and both of us have been building cross-platform app systems for the past 10 years. Over the coming months, we'll be partnering with early-access merchants to iterate on the SDK before offering it publicly. If you're interested, please reach out!
Kinsey Durham Grace
This is awesome! Congrats on the launch 🚀
Emma Lawler
@kinsey_durham_grace thank you!! Let us know if there are any features you'd like to see supported.
Genevieve Lopez
Thanks for sharing Velvet with the Product Hunt community! Can you tell us a bit more about how Velvet differs from other cross-platform tooling for app infrastructure, and how it specifically helps startups improve their onboarding and retention metrics?
Emma Lawler
@cristinaj856 - Great question, thanks. There are two types of solutions teams can use today - (1) app stores, (2) point solutions. The app stores are not cross-platform. Apple gives you auth, payment, and data tooling to build on top of, but they won't help you (or often allow you) sell on Android, web, or anywhere else. Point solutions can be implemented as part of an overall system, but they require investment and resources to connect as a cohesive system, often resulting in poorly designed systems that lead to drop-off, churn, and lost revenue. We're building the connective tissue to authenticate your acquired users, monetize your product, and understand metrics so you can put your most valuable resources toward creating differentiated value beyond the account and paywall.
Jatin Rana
Super cool.. All the best!!
Emma Lawler
@jatin_rana2 Thanks for following!
Amberly Hendel
Congrats on the launch! 🎉🎉
Chris Hendel
@amberly_hendel Thanks Amberly!
Colin Mathews
Congrats on your launch. Great name! And I love your design. I think your showcasing of real-world use cases is really helpful. Curious why you launched without pricing? Is it just because you're kind of in "early access" mode? One other thing I would personally need to know before becoming a customer is how locked in I would be to your platform. Not that I'd want to leave -- if the product was nailing its promise I wouldn't, but if I didn't feel like I could pull out and abort if things weren't going well it would make me really hesitant to try it. Good luck and I'm hoping the best for you all!
Emma Lawler
@colinmathews - thanks, really helpful feedback! For merchants, there will be a few different pricing tiers depending on what features you want to leverage. It's free to use our basic hosted checkout pages, with paid features like custom domains and access to the SDK. We're still early, so it's most important for us to find great teams to work with before we monetize too much. Happy to collaborate as an early design partner if you're interested! Makes sense on the hesitancy around lock-in. We'll make sure there's flexibility for merchants to offboard if needed, while still respecting user privacy and experience. If there are any features or concerns that seem highest priority related to this topic, please let us know.
Dan Lesser
Thanks for posting! Really cool product. For non-technical members of growth/product teams 🙋‍♂️, would Velvet enable accounts creation and payments without any engineering implementation?
Emma Lawler
@dan_lesser - Yep, great question. Our hosted checkout pages are a no-code way to create accounts for new users, identify returning users, and accept payments using Stripe. Once you want a native or cross-platform experience, your engineering team can use our SDK built on top of the exact same system. This means you'll never need to do an arduous migration or risk losing valuable customer data as you scale. The other major benefit for non-technical members of the team is the control you'll have over onboarding and retention once Velvet is integrated. You'll be able to change copy, experiment with pricing, view data, and manage users without the support of an engineer. Let me know if there are any features you're particularly interested in!