Over 4,000 developers use Devbook to make them more productive.

Learn how Devbook chose Magic to onboard users with the least amount of friction possible and achieved over 90% conversion rate.

#In search of a seamless auth solution

Devbook is a search engine, purpose-built for developers. With keyboard shortcuts, you can easily search Stack Overflow and documentation directly without leaving your IDE (integrated development environment). It works similar to Spotlight on macOS.

The idea for Devbook came from the two co-founders’ own pain points. As developers themselves, Vasek Mlejnsky and Tomas Valenta realized they spent more and more time searching for answers to questions on Google or in 3rd party tools. Context switching from code to browser slowed them down, and they became inspired to solve this problem.

When Vasek was considering authentication, the team was already migrating away from Firebase completely, after deciding not to use their functions and database. The challenge was to find the right authentication service that felt as intuitive to implement and use, particularly as their users are time-strapped developers.

“From the start, we knew it would be a bad idea to build auth from scratch. We didn’t have several weeks to spend only on that. There are so many possible security headaches, and we’re not security engineers.”

Rolling their own authentication system was never considered an option. The rationale? Time and speed. The sheer number of weeks and cycles that would have been spent on auth and security was too high an opportunity cost for their lean team.

In the beginning, Vasek explored Okta and Auth0 and came to the same conclusion: both options felt geared towards enterprises and were not a good fit for a small, fast-growing startup. From pricing to complex documentation, neither felt like friendly solutions that could scale with the hypergrowth they were aiming for.

With auth, their top priorities were to:

• Drive user activation
• Offer a great onboarding experience (especially important for a desktop app)
• Avoid vendor lock-in

#Enter Magic

When Vasek discovered Magic, he immediately saw the benefits of passwordless login. The technology stood out as “forward-thinking”, leveraging blockchain-based, public-private key cryptography rather than traditional user-set credentials.

“Magic was exciting! We wanted to try out something new, something that feels like the app we are developing comes from the future.”

In just a matter of days, the Devbook team made the switch and successfully implemented Magic auth by following the simple, straightforward docs.

See the end-to-end onboarding experience below — better yet, download Devbook here and try out the product for free.

You can watch the onboarding process here.

#Significant boost to conversion

The results far exceeded Vasek’s expectations. Since launch, conversion rate has surpassed 90% with no signs of slowing down. Users have shared overwhelmingly positive feedback.

“We’ve been asking users how much they like the passwordless login and so far literally 100% of those we asked like it a lot!”

With Magic, the Devbook team saved valuable time and bandwidth, freeing up focus for them to be more ambitious with their plans to rapidly iterate on the core product. Perhaps most importantly, their users — developers of all levels, from beginners to advanced — are enthusiastic about the ability to log in seamlessly without needing passwords.