Hi PH! I’m Steven, CEO of Liveblocks (https://liveblocks.io)
Back in 2021, I started Liveblocks with my co-founder Guillaume because we were frustrated by how difficult it was to build engaging collaborative products like Figma, Linear, Notion, and others.
There’s a reason why those companies are thriving. Their secret? They’ve perfected collaboration with realtime comments, intelligent notifications, and multiplayer editing. I witnessed this first hand in 2016-2020 while working on InVision Studio, a design tool from a company that once was valued at nearly $2B with over $100M in annual recurring revenue. We were killing it, but Figma was becoming increasingly popular within the design community, thanks to their incredible browser-based collaborative design tool.
To compete, we knew we had to perfect collaboration in the product, and we knew we had to do it fast. So leadership spun up a dedicated squad to convert InVision Studio from a desktop-based single-user application into a browser-based collaborative-by-default platform. Unfortunately, it was too little, too late. What seemed easy-enough at first glance turned into months-long battles for quality. And fast forward a few years, InVision officially announced they’d be shutting down.
That’s why we created Liveblocks—so that you could write a different story for your company.
Here’s how Liveblocks 2.0 works:
✨ Choose what collaborative features you want to add to your product (comments, notifications, text editor, etc.)
🎨 Use our pre-built fully customizable React components to add those to your app with just a few lines of code
📈 Watch engagement and user growth
Liveblocks already powers collaboration for companies of various industries and stages such as Zapier, Vercel, Hashnode, and more!
Thank you for your support PH 🙏
@stevenfabre Liveblocks revolutionizes the integration of collaborative features into applications, enabling developers to add editing, comments, and notifications in just days instead of months. Their platform significantly accelerates the development process, allowing teams to focus more on innovation and less on implementation. A big thank you to Liveblocks for streamlining and enhancing collaborative application experiences!
@stevenfabre this looks really good. Was curious if you had examples of different industries / types of companies that could harness this? More thoughts
I would love to see what it would have been like to build Slite in 2024 with Libeblocks. You really solve some of the biggest problems we met along the way, so useful for new products!
@stevenfabre aha hard to say after 7 years of work we have quite a robust system all around 🤔
Ok the biggest challenge we have would be enabling more offline capability, maybe doing a local first implementation, etc, all these very core implementation of the collab and fetch system!
Super proud of our team and what we've crushed in the past few months 🖤
Making the web a more team-based playground has never been easier, and I can't wait to see the amazing experiences our users will put together with Liveblocks.
🚀 Let's make the web a more collaborative space!
I absolutely love Liveblocks. They're pushing the limits when it comes to building a stellar developer experience across the board, not only with multiplayer software.
Liveblocks 2.0 looks like a fantastic solution for adding collaboration features quickly! I'm curious, how do you ensure the platform remains scalable and maintains performance as more users collaborate in real-time?
@p_val we have spent years building and optimizing our infrastructure. Each room (the collaborative space in which you collaborate with people) lives on an edge location close to users. This enables us to scale horizontally. We now power over 10M connections/week.
@craig_keeling for a CEO of Product Hunt to reshare this to their personal LinkedIn just feels like an unfair advantage to me. How many has he reshared?
@craig_keeling it's different coming directly from the founder of Product. How long have you been a member of the community? I've been here since 2014.
Multiplayer collaboration is so essential these days, as most teams are remote or at least hybrid. I've been following Liveblocks for a while and I've been hearing their name more and more often as the main game in town for making your app multiplayer! Congrats on the launch, @stevenfabre and team!
@rajiv_ayyangar thank you Rajiv! So good to hear this from someone who's been building tools in a similar space! Good to have you over at Product Hunt now :)
Wow, Liveblocks 2.0 looks super promising for enhancing collaboration in apps! Love the idea of adding real-time editing and comments so quickly. Curious, how does Liveblocks handle potential conflicts or merge issues when multiple users are editing the same content simultaneously? 🚀
Such a great release — congrats to the entire team. I remember how much time we spent making our text editor live. This would have been such a time saver and game changer.
Hey there @stevenfabre congratulations on the launch of 2.0 version. Team collaboration tool is so essential! The new feature of customizing the uses makes it even more great! Good luck with that.
If “how you do anything is how you do everything,” that landing page is…everything. What are some steps you’ve taken to protect the team’s focus on craft as you grow?
@dianakimball we always try to get the right balance between "staying pragmatic" and "reveling in our craft". There is a healthy tension between these two values that has enabled us to ship things we're truly proud of at a cadence we feel good about! I'm a big believer that high quality doesn't mean shipping less, lots of companies manage to do: Linear, Figma, Framer, and I like to think Liveblocks fits into that category :)
Wow! A natural evolution – this is awesome. As someone working on collaboration in our product, I can confirm doing this from scratch is a SLOG...great stuff @stevenfabre & team 👏👏
The real win was the customer-experience leveled up in a fundamental way but the sheer amount of code I got to delete in favor of moving onto LiveBlocks was amazing in itself. Twofers like this are magical.
Liveblocks