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!
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.
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 :).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 tried several and am currently setting up Realms-Wiki in a set of docker containers -- as I write this -- it looks like it covers enough of what I need that it may just work. Collaborative editing would be a nice-to-have, but it's way more important to me to be able to just use 'git' rather than have fancy ether-pad like functionality[4]. Unfortunately, after looking over Slite, it doesn't look like it fits well for me. I couldn't find anything regarding Markdown support, which -- even if it had a perfect WYSIWYG interface, minimally means having to convert my existing library. It looks like the target audience is Confluence users who are as dissatisfied with the product as I am, but for different reasons.
I'm certainly not crapping on the effort - the product looks polished, slack integration is nice and I am a believer that there's a lot of room for improvement in this space. Had I been looking to "begin keeping a team notebook", I'd sign up and give it a shot based on what I've read from the site, but I'm not that guy, unfortunately. Best of luck, either way!
[0] I feel dread the moment I find the need to use "AllInText: " in my search query.
[1] And I'll be the first to admit that I'm really particular, and I'm probably not a good target to build a product against.
[2] No, I didn't want to bold the whole line, just the word. I didn't want to indent that whole paragraph, just the first line. Why is that one miserable bullet indented 1.5 times further than the rest and when I hit the "unindent" button, it becomes 0.5 times as indented as the rest. That should be a "Heading 1". No, just that. Not the rest of it. And why did you move everything down another line there, but not anywhere else? (/rant)
[3] I have several .css files for formatting Markdown in a variety of ways -- even being able to use it to print up a proper "proposal"-style document complete with a cover-page. My company has a gorgeous Word template for all of that. My Markdown .css creates output that's indistinguishable from that template. I hate Word this much.
[4] So now the target audience for my magically wanted product is ... a few people on Hacker News who take notes like me. See [1] (:
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.
Right now I am really impressed with how coda.io creates documents with structured data, which is a different paradigm that overlaps with some note taking applications.
[1] https://www.quora.com/Are-there-any-modern-confluence-altern...
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.
The fact of having collaborative editing, an organization that actually works for teams & content shared by default among others makes all the difference.