Launch HN: Slite (YC W18) – Note App for Teams
I've launched two companies in the past and basically ran them on note-taking apps. The first was a hiring SaaS and the second an on-demand fashion-delivery service, and while the two were pretty different, I needed to write down a lot of stuff: interview notes, mentoring, email and article drafts, notes on customers and so on.
I had this habit because notes are versatile, incredibly user-friendly, and immediate. They made up my personal knowledge base but the biggest frustration I had was sharing those with teammates. So I decided to build a note app that would work with teams from day 1.
This is in line with the current problems in team collaboration. A lot of people were thrilled to dump email to get on Slack, but recent conversation has shifted towards Slack killing team productivity and leading to loss of information. This topic even trended on HN a week ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16355454.
We’re building an asynchronous writing tool for teams to organize their work with one simple yet crucial goal in mind: make sure teams stop losing valuable information and find it more quickly. We want to remove the back and forth you have on Slack, via email or even offline to find information.
We use the same channels pattern as Slack, mainly because this avoids the folders structure where content is hard to find, organize and where permissions are a nightmare. But using Slite allows you to separate use cases: channel chat a la IRC or Slack to communicate instantly, Slite to write and retrieve information.
Another major product focus is search: existing tools such as Google Docs or Dropbox Paper make it hard to organize and navigate through content (not to mention Slack where everything get lost between cat gifs). We put huge efforts on making it seamless in Slite.
With these basic differences we've already convinced hundreds of teams and thousands of active users to switch their content over from Google Docs, Dropbox Paper or other tools. We’re now entering a new phase where we’re focusing on integrations, allowing teams to push and access their information from anywhere in their workflows.
It’s an exciting time and we’d love for you to check it out and give us your feedback. And we're eager to hear your ideas in this space. Please share your thoughts in the comments!
78 comments
[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 93.2 ms ] threadThe fact of having collaborative editing, an organization that actually works for teams & content shared by default among others makes all the difference.
To be noted: our public API will be available soon and will let you develop sync mechanisms with other tools if needed.
The reason behind that is Slite's UX and the fact we have designed the tool since day 1 to hold not only "wikis" but also meeting notes, specs, interview, snippets and so on.
[1] https://www.notion.so/
But the complexity of their structure makes it really hard for non technical people to apprehend. Channels make Slite easy to use for anyone in your team. The second thing is that Notion is built like google docs or paper with a loose notion of team : it's an open tool, where permissions can get messy pretty fast.
We have teams of 150+ people on Slite for this reason.
I also have the vague feeling that those tools have hard to understand team permissions, but I'm unclear on how Slite solves this in a better way. Either way, sounds interesting. Congrats on the launch!
The easy way to see that is by checking a Google Drive structure : you have "My Drive", then some folders, some shared, some not, and in parallel "Shared with me" gathering documents that can come from outside your team, and that you can also put in "my drive"... It's centered around individuals and weirdly works for them, but is absolutely not suited to organize and retrieve content as a team.
Slite actually creates a well defined private space for your team, which makes it possible to share by default. When I update our roadmap or our hiring process, I know all the relevant people can see the channel highlighted, and can get updated. In another tool, the authors would have to push a link by email or irc to get their team updated. And this mereley because they knew that else nobody would see it had changed and nobody could retrieve it in a shared folder structure.
Completely side but awesome job on Slate! We have spent a lot of time working on editors, and might switch to it at some point, so keep up the good work!
That makes sense re: teams, thanks!
Have you tried to think about hierarchical data like gingkoapp?
How about "structured data" do you have the idea of templates that require these xx data points?
A melding of the "content blocks" from project Gutenberg for WordPress & Gingkoapp's hierarchical data would make for a killer knowledge-base I'd gladly part with money to have personally & professionally.
I love as a product person Workflowy or the concept of gingkoapp (and notion quoted above also relate to that I think).
The problem of complex structure is having a part of the team writing knowledge with comfort, all the rest not able to retrieving it, it really defeats the whole purpose.
That's why we're really focused on making information easy to write and easy to access without complexity for the rest of your team. And the most straightforward feature to allow structured data to us is simple internal links, like in a wiki. You can just type @+ name of your note to create an link internal to your Slite.
I get that this is a massive problem space but with dropbox, notion, google and loads of other companies working on the exact same thing.... I have a hard time understanding why Y Combinator accepts companies like these.
Either way, excited to try it out; sounds like you've put a lot of BS&T into this.
Data, is my guess. Existing note apps perhaps don't collect, package, and act on (sell) that data as well as they could. I would not be surprised if that's a major component of any new company that just looks to be re-hashing existing companies. Their "new" approach is an improved UI, and massive data collection.
On the why investors would fund us, I think the "note" aspect of it is misleading: it's simply giving an ease of use to our users, but the core of slite is the team aspect of it, and our will is to solve knowledge sharing in teams. While this is not solved, clearly investors will fund projects like Slite.
My point was more about data that is no longer personal. Couldn't you for example still collect and run analytics on user data, which you could sell to 3rd parties as generalized "hey people are talking about your product X"?
For instance maybe you track discussions about specific tools in the tech industry... Let's take IDEs as an example. You could build a portfolio of useful data to Microsoft about the sentiment toward their Visual Studio system.
I'm not saying you guys ARE doing that, I was just attempting to answer the question of why investors might opt to jump into this (crowded) space. I have no problem with that kind of data collection btw. It's the personal stuff I don't like :) . Whether you're collecting non-personal data doesn't really matter as long as you're not selling identifiable info (which your privacy policy clearly states you are not).
We have absolutely no plan on doing that, even for anonymized data. The only use of this data is for the application's purposes and to be honest if we could bring the same value with End to end encryption, we would do it.
The reason for not doing it is simple : we have a much simpler business model, Slite actually provides way enough value for active teams to start paying and that's enough to focus on ;)
We funded Slite because "another note app" might be a billion dollar company. "Another search engine" was Google, "another social network" was Facebook, and "another file storage service" was Dropbox.
Slite's plan is to charge users directly, similar to Slack. This has proven to be a great business model and means they won't need to resort to sneaky things like selling data.
My main reason for posting was because while I did understand why you'd start a business that did X better, I didn't necessarily think that would be enough to convince investors. I was wrong!
I agree their business model could a the key to success, but from a user’s point of view, what is the reason that would make me want to pay for this new service? At a glance, it is quite similar to other note apps
Slite's value proposition is strongest in a mid-sized company, where you can model the organizational structure within the product.
This isn't to take anything away from the app itself, but with almost 1500 companies funded by YC, and access to more connections and marketing...well, you get the point.
4000 teams of 1 that used it for a couple of weeks before abandoning is way different than 4000 teams of 100 that are active everyday.
Unfortunately, as far as I'm concerned, none of these (or any existing note-taking app that I've tried) hits the sweet spot for me. I've commented on several note-taking apps in the past -- quite enthusiastically -- and I'd really like to see more.
For some background, I live and die by my notes. Mainly due to spending about a decade developing against an obscure set of APIs that were poorly documented, and that Google proved somewhat worthless for, I ended up creating a rather large library of code snippets and documentation around corner cases with three specific APIs. Over time, I started documenting other things. We've all ran into that case where we search for a solution to a problem, find 70 different answers, 68 of which are somewhere between OK and awful, two of which fix the "corner-case". You fix it and move on only to encounter it again a few months/years down the road -- only this time, the bookmark is dead. So you spend an hour crafting ever-more-elaborate search queries[0] to surface something resembling those two, good, solutions. I've always got my note-editor open and the format is so quick to work with that I started documenting those, as well. Yeah, the best coarse of action would be for me to put this out on my blog, and I do put the really interesting (to me) ones out there, but I don't have time to do that every time I need to write a note.
I am also, routinely, put on projects for the purpose of analyzing an existing, large code-base and proposing improvements. This results in several-hundred printed pages of notes which serve as a map of the project. After proposing improvements, I'm usually one of the folks (or the only 'folk') involved in implementing them. Having a simple, low-overhead way of handling this sort of thing is critical.
For my particularly narrow circumstances[1], all of the note-keeping/note-taking tools out there are somewhere between tolerable and terrible. We use Confluence at my office -- I hate it. The WYSIWYG interface works as well as Word[2]. There's a Markdown plug-in, but the resulting document has the Markdown parts wrapped within the plug-in and it doesn't look right. I also have little control over how the Markdown is rendered other than some baked-in tempaltes. I like a well formatted document[3]; Markdown lets me communicate that formatting effortlessly and explicitly. It looks good in the console (often better than a non-Markdown text-file if you use a linter-enabled editor). I store my notes in a git repository, which I now sync via keybase.io's encrypted git. This lets me keep my notes on an encrypted volume, complete with semi-sensitive information (and git-secrets for passwords/IDs and such), and store it end-to-end encrypted somewhere else for when my drive inevitably fails, and I can keep a copy of my notes on every machine I use. Most importantly, though ... getting information out of my notes involves "grep -R 'expression' (star)", and it screams on an SSD. With the addition of a -B or -A, I rarely have to actually open the document to find the answer I need.
Generally speaking, I use VSCode on Linux with the (excellent) Markdown Enhanced Preview extension to take most of my notes, or 'vim'. One or both of these is open at all times on my development machines. I generally use VSCode because I like a live-preview of what I'm writing, despite not wanting a WYSIWYG editor. No. Please, God No[2-again!].
My ideal solution would be self-hosted (I'm open to cloud-hosted if it's end-to-end encrypted and reasonably priced), git-backed or at least offering a way for me to clone ... everything, Markdown+Highlight.js-baesd with templates that can be customized and applied per-document or per-task. There are a few out there that come close. I've ...
Now, if they can just make search a bit better, it'd hit enough bullet points that I'd stop complaining about it.
Thanks, so much, for taking the time to keep me informed!
An active user from Russia here :). We are a small team of seven developers and we already love Slite.
Before Slite we were using multiple Google Docs and Sheets files to manage our team notes, and Trello to write down decisions we made during team meetings. We would create a lot of files on Google and send links to each other using Telegram or email. It's OK if you don't have a lot of documents but after a few months of working it's became a pain in the ass to find some particular file (and it's actual, team-approved version).
On Trello we had this 'Notes' board, where we would put all the notes on product decisions and team meetings, but it quickly became overloaded with stuff and you would hardly find anything there.
That's why our team loved Slite so much. It's very simple yet powerful tool. I am not sure if there anything else like that. Probably yes. But we are absolutely satisfied with Slite and like that its team already reached out to us to gather our feedback :).
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Will Slite do a better job at understanding our bug reports than Github? Or understanding our applicant tracking system then Greenhouse? Our customer support than Zendesk? Every one of these tools have a search feature.
The value of Google Docs is that it stays out of my way, lets me create freeform notes, and integrates with the rest of Google. Probably the same for Paper, or any other team notes solution. Once something gets complex enough, creates work for teams, or is mission critical, it either needs to be actively managed by a team member, or move into an automated tool that does that management for us. I can't imagine the solution would be to centralize all these disparate workflows in a tool like this.
I still think having all the information compartmentalized is a waste of time. The integrations that we are developing aim at solving this : Slite will integrate with your github documentation and your Greenhouse pipe so that the members that need the information but don't use the tool everyday (typical in an hiring process) can see the information while those whom it's the job will keep using it as usual.
Similarly, we and many other companies have their own custom project lifecycle which would be a useful template to be able to create and track for each project.
Edit: A few small quips. Audit how you use the word public. That's going to scare people. I assume you mean make the channel read/write for other members of my slite, not the public at large.
Someone else had this idea in the comments, I would also second the motion that adding controlled fields (select from drop down) could help with templates.
Good luck!
For the differenciation with Slack, the similarity really stops with the channels pattern. Using Slite allows you to separate use cases: Slack or equivalent to communicate instantly, Slite to write and retrieve information.
As a back story, Slack did try something similar a few years back: they built Slack posts with a similar vision in mind. But having those burried in threads and writing in a constantly ringing place defeated their purpose. From talking to our users, it seems like really few people use posts as they were intended in the first place. At the end of the day, having to organize your content and handling collaborative edition is a job for a standalone product
For the wording indeed, a teammate just mentionned the same thing on "public" wording, we'll think of a better term, "team-wide" maybe.
As for the templating option it's clearly something we're thinking about, the challenge is to make the feature simple enough.
Curious if you talk more about your target market? This feels geared toward smaller start-up like orgs that may already have something similar/have no legacy tie-ups.
However, have you thought about teams in larger enterprises that are likely to be hooked into the use of Microsoft Word/Excel, and especially Outlook, and may use something like Skype for internal chat? Think there are numerous folks (like me) who are on top of newer/interesting tech but have to fight hard to move people away from their habits.
Further example: would you build or allow access to legacy Exchange servers?
The thing is we solve way more issues for teams between 20-200 people, as they are the one struggling with process and knowledge sharing. The strategy we have to convince them is by integrating in their workflow : if Slite can solve their issues while requiring a low-cost setup by integrating in their toolchain, we think it can prove value quickly enough for those teams to adopt it. And clearly Skype or Office will be at some point included in those integrations.
As for the Exchange servers to be honest I have no idea and it will highly depend on our users' demand.
I used my @gmail account to sign up and now I'm seeing 2 companies listed as groups I can join. I assume that's because these people also used @gmail accounts to create those team accounts. Either way, even with the email verification it seems like you wouldn't want to list all the companies that match the domain.
On my own personal project where I have a team of 8 I tried Gitbook but when I lost a bunch of stuff do with git pull that override my local changes I really disliked Gitbook.
I convinced my work to get on Confluence so we at least have a knowledge base. I find Confluence like all Atlassian products clunky, slow and cumbersome to navigate.
I really liked Backpack, however its dated and structuralized for an older workflow.
I look at Slite and think, does it handle code blocks well? Is it navigation easy and feels fast? How clunky is the rich text editor?
I personally don't like the look, the open source outline looks more professional. I would have borrow design elements from Discord than Slack.
To me this is a gimmick of piggybacking on the familiarity of slack channels to take something that has already existed (collaborative note and note-like apps). An old tool for a new generation.
Since I've built my open-source HTML5 game in Electron I feel I could whip up my own note-taking app because my feeling is I'm not going to be sold on either Outline or Slite.
I went to connect with my Google Account As soon as Slite asked to view my Contacts, I stopped. Its like asking to see someone's facebook on a first date. No Thank you.
So I go and check Outline, since its open-source but you have to have a slack account and create a Slack App, No Thank you.
I guess I should build my own.
The issue with All Rights Reserved means lets say I were to put a ton of work into Outline and I want to monetize the work I put in to provide easy hosted solutions. I can't. I'm not saying I want to monetize but I don't know how much effort I will put in and then may regret giving you so much free code.
We clearly have a lot in common with Quip. The main difference as of now is organization : Quip is organized exactly like a google Drive, with nested folders while Slite uses channels. It makes the content accessible, permissions easy to manage and actually shows your team important changes of the content.
The other thing really different that we're building is integrations: Quip focuses on in-editor integrations (which are great, we're working on those as well). But for the rest, unlike quip we keep a simple markdown-compliant (& thus universal) format, which let us fetch and push content to all your toolchain.
One way to get exposure for this product would be to have academic pricing. The current pricing means it wouldn't be used for teaching, but with a low enough price, it might work.