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Launch HN: Slite (YC W18) – Note App for Teams

127 points by christophepas 9y ago

Hi HN! I'm Chris, founder of Slite (https://slite.com https://slite.com). We’re building a tool for modern teams to write down and retrieve things that matter. 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 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!

aaronbrethorst 9y ago
It's interesting to me that you don't mention Evernote anywhere in your description, here.
- christophepas 9y ago
  Good point, while we are definitely related by the "note" aspect, the team aspect of Slite is more important and it seems to me Evernote has never done a good job on that part. The fact of having collaborative editing, an organization that actually works for teams & content shared by default among others makes all the difference.
whoisjuan 9y ago
Would you ever provide exporting/importing mechanisms for people to migrate out of tools like Confluence? Is that something on the roadmap?
- christophepas 9y ago
  Thanks for asking! It's actually something we're currently working on, and one of the top feature requests we have : we'll provide import from major services (google docs, confluence, paper) and export for backup purposes to google drive. To be noted: our public API will be available soon and will let you develop sync mechanisms with other tools if needed.
deleted 9y ago
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kerv 9y ago
How do you compare with Confluence? Are you just trying to provide a better ease of use?
- christophepas 9y ago
  We have a bunch of teams that jumped from Confluence to Slite simply because they actually went from opening Confluence every month or so to using Slite daily. 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.
elvinyung 9y ago
Not to be a shill, but this feels extremely similar to Notion [1] -- in fact I'm failing to see substantiative differences in the collaboration interfaces, the freeform editing, etc. How does it differentiate? [1] https://www.notion.so/ https://www.notion.so/
- christophepas 9y ago
  No worry it's a perfectly fair point. In our experience, Notion is a great tool and can work within small teams adapted of product and technical people. 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.
  - ianstormtaylor 9y ago
    Do you have any info on what makes the teams concept better than those in Notion / Google Docs / Paper? 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!
    - christophepas 9y ago
      Well the 'team' is actually defined in Slite, while google docs, paper or notion have rights granted on each folder / page / doc for a loose set of people. 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!
ckluis 9y ago
Hi Chris! We all need better documentation/knowledge-base software/processes. I personally love workflowy, but have always admired the idea of gingkoapp. 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.
- christophepas 9y ago
  Hey! 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.
alexjray 9y ago
Another note app? 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.
- rubicon33 9y ago
  Indeed, why would investors throw money at another note app? 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.
  - christophepas 9y ago
    Short answer : absolutely not, you can have a look at our privacy policy here : https://slite.com/privacy https://slite.com/privacy. 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.
    - rubicon33 9y ago
      Sure enough looks like your privacy policy explicitly states that 3rd parties aren't going to be receiving our PERSONAL data. Thanks for the clarification. I think that covers one's worries about personal (identifiable data). 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).
o_____________o 9y ago
Do you have any plans for self-hosting or E2EE?
- christophepas 9y ago
  Unfortunately not for now, while we clearly understand the need we can't afford that for now.
- tommoor 9y ago
  I'm part of a group working on a similar knowledge wiki product that's open-source and self hostable, you might find it interesting: https://github.com/outline/outline https://github.com/outline/outline
goertzen 9y ago
Congrats Chris! Look forward to trying it. But as of now, I’m getting this error. {"data":null,"errors":{"message":"Cannot destructure property `MAILCHIMP_API_KEY` of 'undefined' or 'null'."}}
- christophepas 9y ago
  Super sorry about that, we'll fix that asap! This is an issue normaly just on the mobile site, you can give it a try on the desktop in the meantime
  - christophepas 9y ago
    It's fixed, again sorry about that!
tarr11 9y ago
Looking at this page, https://slite.com/use-cases https://slite.com/use-cases, I feel like this kind of product is an anti-pattern. The reason that it's hard to find things in slack or docs is because these apps do not well understand the underlying structure of the data and so are relegated to either full-text search, or some sort of naive clustering algorithm. Although Slack has made some advances here - such as adding context-specific buttons for actions. 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.
- christophepas 9y ago
  That's a super interesting point and I fully agree those examples are not well suited for all teams, especially not for larger ones. 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.
sebleon 9y ago
This is awesome. As a Bear power user, I’ve been looking for a collaborative note-app that just works. Haven’t gotten a beta invite yet for mobile app (key imo), but this seems promising!
joebo 9y ago
Your templates feature is useful and seems to be missing in most notes apps I've looked at. We are looking for a tool to create our playbooks in and then track the execution of instances of those plays. For example, a "onboarding playbook" can be cloned for each instance of a hire. 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.
- christophepas 9y ago
  Thanks for the feedback, that's one of the feature that is delicate to create in app without bringing too much complexity, but it's definitely the goal at some point, and our current templates are a poc of it.
edelans 9y ago
Congrats Chris ! So many things achieved since last year. I'm impressed. Keep it up !
danvoell 9y ago
I like the concept. IMO, the keys are going to be 1.) Showing how you differ from Slack 2.)simplifying, I'm already overwhelmed but I get what you are trying to do. and 3.)Ubiquity of the templates. Make it easy to make, clone, share, track them. 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!
- christophepas 9y ago
  Thanks for the feedback ! 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.
deleted 9y ago
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grvdrm 9y ago
Hi Chris -- the app looks great, nice work. Aesthetically similar to Slack, for sure, but there are some obvious differences as well. 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?
- christophepas 9y ago
  Sure, this is something a bit special : we clearly have an easy way to get into new companies, there is no friction on getting on Slite for them. 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.
goertzen 9y ago
Ok, got it working on desktop. But now I'm seeing something else that concerns me a bit. 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.
- christophepas 9y ago
  Super sorry for the experience this has been now fixed (it's actually a relicate, the issue can't happen on new teams)
  - goertzen 9y ago
    Great! And great job fielding these questions/comments.
andrew_wc_brown 9y ago
A Knowledge/Note based system is very useful for teams. 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.
- dahx4Eev 9y ago
  Have you considered building it based on BoostNote?
- tommoor 9y ago
  Come and help us add other authentication options to Outline ;) I can promise you it'll be easier than "whipping up your own"
  - andrew_wc_brown 9y ago
    I had already opened up the Outline codebase but then stopped because The copyright is All Rights Reserved. Its not MIT. 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.
viperscape 9y ago
Looks like OneNote http://onenote.com http://onenote.com
CocoaGeek 9y ago
This is nice. A little hesitant to migrate to something that may not be around in a few months ... Not to be the voice of doom, but it's a legitimate concern IMHO (this isn't the first note web app) ...
- christophepas 9y ago
  Hey there, totally legitimate concern, I'll just say without spoiling that we're really here for the long run ;)
  - CocoaGeek 9y ago
    Great, glad to read that 8)
samiralajmovic 9y ago
Why do you need the permission "View your contacts" (Google Contacts) when signing up? I would sign up and try the product but I'm not going to disclose all my contacts.
- christophepas 9y ago
  This import is there to let you invite your team more easily after signup. You can absolutely login with email password if you want to avoid that but do note that it's just an helper, the app won't send emails by its own.
  - whatl3y 9y ago
    I realize this can be a little bit (sometimes more than a little bit) of a development overhead to manage, but isn't the right way to do this is to only require the minimum oauth scopes upon signing up, then add additional scopes and re-auth at the time it's needed (i.e. when someone wants to perform an import)?
  - samiralajmovic 9y ago
    I tried logging in but it says there doesn't exist a team to join. So when I try to create a new team using gmail, it asks for my connections. I also assume it won't send emails on its own, but still it's information that shouldn't be necessary for me to share in order to join your application.
marlonmisra 9y ago
We've been using Slite for ~3 weeks. I highly recommend it - much better organization, useful templates, and by far the best UI in the space.
aviv 9y ago
Does this do anything that Quip doesn't?
- heropotato 9y ago
  Totally agreed. It does keep reminding me of Quip.
- christophepas 9y ago
  Hey! 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.
bachmeier 9y ago
This doesn't look the same as other tools to me. Maybe that's just a comment HN folk make out of habit. 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.
- christophepas 9y ago
  We have not pushed that on the homepage yet, but there will be a strong discount for NGOs and academic institutions actually!
orliesaurus 9y ago
i like the templates and reminds me a lot of the "Trello prebuilt boards" shared by the community - best of luck !
- christophepas 9y ago
  Thanks ;) We're especially inspired by airtable & their "Universe" page
AndrewConn 9y ago
Don’t listen to the people that say “Ugh, not another notes/docs app”. They way you’re thinking about the problem and how you’re solving it, I believe, are right. Your product reminds me a lot of Quip... which Salesforce bought for ~$750M.
gregwebs 9y ago
This looks exactly like Confluence (no doubt it is better designed in various ways). Here is a Quora question asking for Confluence alternatives (Slite listed). [1] 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-alternatives-Are-there-wiki-CRM-solutions-out-there-that-meet-modern-expectations-of-content-creation-but-allow-wiki-style-organization-navigation-and-search https://www.quora.com/Are-there-any-modern-confluence-altern...
- AnnoyingSwede 9y ago
  As a confluence admin, i can only agree. This looks like Confluence with Hipchat and a colorful CSS integrated. Pretty sure this is where a lot of the inspiration is coming from. One can only hope they will not take the atlassian approach on solving feature-request or bug-fixes, because then it would actually be confluence :) Will give it a test run however.
sAbakumoff 9y ago
>We’re building a tool for modern teams to write down and retrieve things that matter. Do you re-invent paper?
ramon 9y ago
What about Evernote Business?
lobster_johnson 9y ago
I've been looking for a collaborative alternative to Evernote (which is terribly) and Google Docs (which is very functional, but in many ways terrible) for some time, and I've also looked at Notion. Slite looks beautiful, and the on-boarding is slick. But it fails in too many ways, just like Notion. Slite channels don't scale beyond a few notes. Like Evernote, the sidebar becomes a hard-to-navigate, endlessly scrolling list of stuff, and search becomes the only way to find what you want, which is of course terrible for discovery. There's no grouping mechanism where order matters. "Collections" are sorted, but only by title or date, not manually. So there's no way to collate and publish information. Google Docs, of course, has the same problem. This is one area where Notion is marginally better, since pages have an inherent order, so you can build "books" of content (e.g. technical documentation, project plans, etc.). But you still have to manually create the navigation, since tables of contents aren't made for you. In Slite, publishing anything that has structure is basically impossible — everything is just a sea of notes. Another problem with Slite and Notion is that there are, inherently, types of notes/pages, but there's no way to classify them except possibly by tag. A set of meeting notes != a project plan != a scrapbook of possible office furniture != a todo list. And so on. The more I think about apps like Evernote and Slite, the more I think the idea of note as an independent unit of information is wrong — unless all you do is write notes that have a short life cycle, like shopping lists. To build an organization around information, the information model has to be powerful. For example, a common use case shown in screenshots for Slite and other products is the idea of a checklist. We're doing a project, we have to have some designs, do some marketing, do some development. We create an outline: [ ] Hire intern to work on leaflets What's a thing that happens? Someone wants to comment on a specific task. So you have some person writing it into the document: [ ] Hire intern to work on leaflets *(who's gonna do this? Brad??!)* then: [ ] Hire intern to work on leaflets *(who's gonna do this? Brad??!)* I'm on it — Liz :) And off it goes. There's an inherent underlying data model here (checklists) expressed as a freely editable WYSIWYG bullet list. Documents like these quickly turn into messy junk, like a whiteboard full of scribbles, because people are all over it. Google Docs has an annotation feature for this, but it doesn't scale at all. I've looked through the product tour and tons of screenshots looking for what people are actually using Slite for, and I mostly see disorder. Meeting notes, sure. Project planning, todo list, bugs, scrapbooking, wiki-type tech docs... none of it seems appropriate for Slite, which leaves me wondering what I could use it for. I don't need another poor Evernote, I don't think anyone does, even if it's nicer-looking. At one point I wondered if Slite could be useful for scrapbooking (example use case: collecting tons of inspirational material for guide one's interior design directions for the company office; another is collecting a bunch of products for comparison before whittling down candidates for purchase), but it's unfortunately not. You can't even drag and drop files into the web page, and once you've uploaded a file or image to the page, it cannot be moved around or copied/pasted (!). Notion at least gets one kind of useful data model right, which is that of a wiki. Interlinking is, strangely enough, a buried feature (to you have to click on "Copy Link" of a page, then paste that, to get an inline link), but it's there.
toifiz 9y ago
Does it support offline mode ? In my company, the sales team is often int the customer's building (for example for a demo) and often there is no wifi or any internet connection. So, we're looking for a documentation system that can be synchronized when opened and works perfectly offline (including full-text search). At this moment, we are testing Microsoft OneNote.

127 points by christophepas 9y ago

aaronbrethorst 9y ago

It's interesting to me that you don't mention Evernote anywhere in your description, here.

christophepas 9y ago
Good point, while we are definitely related by the "note" aspect, the team aspect of Slite is more important and it seems to me Evernote has never done a good job on that part. The fact of having collaborative editing, an organization that actually works for teams & content shared by default among others makes all the difference.

whoisjuan 9y ago

Would you ever provide exporting/importing mechanisms for people to migrate out of tools like Confluence? Is that something on the roadmap?

christophepas 9y ago
Thanks for asking! It's actually something we're currently working on, and one of the top feature requests we have : we'll provide import from major services (google docs, confluence, paper) and export for backup purposes to google drive. To be noted: our public API will be available soon and will let you develop sync mechanisms with other tools if needed.

deleted 9y ago

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kerv 9y ago

How do you compare with Confluence? Are you just trying to provide a better ease of use?

christophepas 9y ago
We have a bunch of teams that jumped from Confluence to Slite simply because they actually went from opening Confluence every month or so to using Slite daily. 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.

elvinyung 9y ago

Not to be a shill, but this feels extremely similar to Notion [1] -- in fact I'm failing to see substantiative differences in the collaboration interfaces, the freeform editing, etc. How does it differentiate? [1] https://www.notion.so/ https://www.notion.so/

christophepas 9y ago
No worry it's a perfectly fair point. In our experience, Notion is a great tool and can work within small teams adapted of product and technical people. 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.
- ianstormtaylor 9y ago
  Do you have any info on what makes the teams concept better than those in Notion / Google Docs / Paper? 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!
  - christophepas 9y ago
    Well the 'team' is actually defined in Slite, while google docs, paper or notion have rights granted on each folder / page / doc for a loose set of people. 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!

ckluis 9y ago

Hi Chris! We all need better documentation/knowledge-base software/processes. I personally love workflowy, but have always admired the idea of gingkoapp. 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.

christophepas 9y ago
Hey! 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.

alexjray 9y ago

Another note app? 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.

rubicon33 9y ago
Indeed, why would investors throw money at another note app? 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.
- christophepas 9y ago
  Short answer : absolutely not, you can have a look at our privacy policy here : https://slite.com/privacy https://slite.com/privacy. 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.
  - rubicon33 9y ago
    Sure enough looks like your privacy policy explicitly states that 3rd parties aren't going to be receiving our PERSONAL data. Thanks for the clarification. I think that covers one's worries about personal (identifiable data). 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).

o_____________o 9y ago

Do you have any plans for self-hosting or E2EE?

christophepas 9y ago
Unfortunately not for now, while we clearly understand the need we can't afford that for now.
tommoor 9y ago
I'm part of a group working on a similar knowledge wiki product that's open-source and self hostable, you might find it interesting: https://github.com/outline/outline https://github.com/outline/outline

goertzen 9y ago

Congrats Chris! Look forward to trying it. But as of now, I’m getting this error. {"data":null,"errors":{"message":"Cannot destructure property `MAILCHIMP_API_KEY` of 'undefined' or 'null'."}}

christophepas 9y ago
Super sorry about that, we'll fix that asap! This is an issue normaly just on the mobile site, you can give it a try on the desktop in the meantime
- christophepas 9y ago
  It's fixed, again sorry about that!

tarr11 9y ago

Looking at this page, https://slite.com/use-cases https://slite.com/use-cases, I feel like this kind of product is an anti-pattern. The reason that it's hard to find things in slack or docs is because these apps do not well understand the underlying structure of the data and so are relegated to either full-text search, or some sort of naive clustering algorithm. Although Slack has made some advances here - such as adding context-specific buttons for actions. 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.

christophepas 9y ago
That's a super interesting point and I fully agree those examples are not well suited for all teams, especially not for larger ones. 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.

sebleon 9y ago

This is awesome. As a Bear power user, I’ve been looking for a collaborative note-app that just works. Haven’t gotten a beta invite yet for mobile app (key imo), but this seems promising!

joebo 9y ago

Your templates feature is useful and seems to be missing in most notes apps I've looked at. We are looking for a tool to create our playbooks in and then track the execution of instances of those plays. For example, a "onboarding playbook" can be cloned for each instance of a hire. 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.

christophepas 9y ago
Thanks for the feedback, that's one of the feature that is delicate to create in app without bringing too much complexity, but it's definitely the goal at some point, and our current templates are a poc of it.

edelans 9y ago

Congrats Chris ! So many things achieved since last year. I'm impressed. Keep it up !

danvoell 9y ago

I like the concept. IMO, the keys are going to be 1.) Showing how you differ from Slack 2.)simplifying, I'm already overwhelmed but I get what you are trying to do. and 3.)Ubiquity of the templates. Make it easy to make, clone, share, track them. 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!

christophepas 9y ago
Thanks for the feedback ! 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.

deleted 9y ago

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grvdrm 9y ago

Hi Chris -- the app looks great, nice work. Aesthetically similar to Slack, for sure, but there are some obvious differences as well. 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?

christophepas 9y ago
Sure, this is something a bit special : we clearly have an easy way to get into new companies, there is no friction on getting on Slite for them. 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.

goertzen 9y ago

Ok, got it working on desktop. But now I'm seeing something else that concerns me a bit. 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.

christophepas 9y ago
Super sorry for the experience this has been now fixed (it's actually a relicate, the issue can't happen on new teams)
- goertzen 9y ago
  Great! And great job fielding these questions/comments.

andrew_wc_brown 9y ago

A Knowledge/Note based system is very useful for teams. 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.

dahx4Eev 9y ago
Have you considered building it based on BoostNote?
tommoor 9y ago
Come and help us add other authentication options to Outline ;) I can promise you it'll be easier than "whipping up your own"
- andrew_wc_brown 9y ago
  I had already opened up the Outline codebase but then stopped because The copyright is All Rights Reserved. Its not MIT. 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.

viperscape 9y ago

Looks like OneNote http://onenote.com http://onenote.com

CocoaGeek 9y ago

This is nice. A little hesitant to migrate to something that may not be around in a few months ... Not to be the voice of doom, but it's a legitimate concern IMHO (this isn't the first note web app) ...

christophepas 9y ago
Hey there, totally legitimate concern, I'll just say without spoiling that we're really here for the long run ;)
- CocoaGeek 9y ago
  Great, glad to read that 8)

samiralajmovic 9y ago

Why do you need the permission "View your contacts" (Google Contacts) when signing up? I would sign up and try the product but I'm not going to disclose all my contacts.

christophepas 9y ago
This import is there to let you invite your team more easily after signup. You can absolutely login with email password if you want to avoid that but do note that it's just an helper, the app won't send emails by its own.
- whatl3y 9y ago
  I realize this can be a little bit (sometimes more than a little bit) of a development overhead to manage, but isn't the right way to do this is to only require the minimum oauth scopes upon signing up, then add additional scopes and re-auth at the time it's needed (i.e. when someone wants to perform an import)?
- samiralajmovic 9y ago
  I tried logging in but it says there doesn't exist a team to join. So when I try to create a new team using gmail, it asks for my connections. I also assume it won't send emails on its own, but still it's information that shouldn't be necessary for me to share in order to join your application.

marlonmisra 9y ago

We've been using Slite for ~3 weeks. I highly recommend it - much better organization, useful templates, and by far the best UI in the space.

aviv 9y ago

Does this do anything that Quip doesn't?

heropotato 9y ago
Totally agreed. It does keep reminding me of Quip.
christophepas 9y ago
Hey! 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.

bachmeier 9y ago

This doesn't look the same as other tools to me. Maybe that's just a comment HN folk make out of habit. 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.

christophepas 9y ago
We have not pushed that on the homepage yet, but there will be a strong discount for NGOs and academic institutions actually!

orliesaurus 9y ago

i like the templates and reminds me a lot of the "Trello prebuilt boards" shared by the community - best of luck !

christophepas 9y ago
Thanks ;) We're especially inspired by airtable & their "Universe" page

AndrewConn 9y ago

Don’t listen to the people that say “Ugh, not another notes/docs app”. They way you’re thinking about the problem and how you’re solving it, I believe, are right. Your product reminds me a lot of Quip... which Salesforce bought for ~$750M.

gregwebs 9y ago

This looks exactly like Confluence (no doubt it is better designed in various ways). Here is a Quora question asking for Confluence alternatives (Slite listed). [1] 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-alternatives-Are-there-wiki-CRM-solutions-out-there-that-meet-modern-expectations-of-content-creation-but-allow-wiki-style-organization-navigation-and-search https://www.quora.com/Are-there-any-modern-confluence-altern...

AnnoyingSwede 9y ago
As a confluence admin, i can only agree. This looks like Confluence with Hipchat and a colorful CSS integrated. Pretty sure this is where a lot of the inspiration is coming from. One can only hope they will not take the atlassian approach on solving feature-request or bug-fixes, because then it would actually be confluence :) Will give it a test run however.

sAbakumoff 9y ago

>We’re building a tool for modern teams to write down and retrieve things that matter. Do you re-invent paper?

ramon 9y ago

What about Evernote Business?

lobster_johnson 9y ago

I've been looking for a collaborative alternative to Evernote (which is terribly) and Google Docs (which is very functional, but in many ways terrible) for some time, and I've also looked at Notion. Slite looks beautiful, and the on-boarding is slick. But it fails in too many ways, just like Notion. Slite channels don't scale beyond a few notes. Like Evernote, the sidebar becomes a hard-to-navigate, endlessly scrolling list of stuff, and search becomes the only way to find what you want, which is of course terrible for discovery. There's no grouping mechanism where order matters. "Collections" are sorted, but only by title or date, not manually. So there's no way to collate and publish information. Google Docs, of course, has the same problem. This is one area where Notion is marginally better, since pages have an inherent order, so you can build "books" of content (e.g. technical documentation, project plans, etc.). But you still have to manually create the navigation, since tables of contents aren't made for you. In Slite, publishing anything that has structure is basically impossible — everything is just a sea of notes. Another problem with Slite and Notion is that there are, inherently, types of notes/pages, but there's no way to classify them except possibly by tag. A set of meeting notes != a project plan != a scrapbook of possible office furniture != a todo list. And so on. The more I think about apps like Evernote and Slite, the more I think the idea of note as an independent unit of information is wrong — unless all you do is write notes that have a short life cycle, like shopping lists. To build an organization around information, the information model has to be powerful. For example, a common use case shown in screenshots for Slite and other products is the idea of a checklist. We're doing a project, we have to have some designs, do some marketing, do some development. We create an outline: [ ] Hire intern to work on leaflets What's a thing that happens? Someone wants to comment on a specific task. So you have some person writing it into the document: [ ] Hire intern to work on leaflets *(who's gonna do this? Brad??!)* then: [ ] Hire intern to work on leaflets *(who's gonna do this? Brad??!)* I'm on it — Liz :) And off it goes. There's an inherent underlying data model here (checklists) expressed as a freely editable WYSIWYG bullet list. Documents like these quickly turn into messy junk, like a whiteboard full of scribbles, because people are all over it. Google Docs has an annotation feature for this, but it doesn't scale at all. I've looked through the product tour and tons of screenshots looking for what people are actually using Slite for, and I mostly see disorder. Meeting notes, sure. Project planning, todo list, bugs, scrapbooking, wiki-type tech docs... none of it seems appropriate for Slite, which leaves me wondering what I could use it for. I don't need another poor Evernote, I don't think anyone does, even if it's nicer-looking. At one point I wondered if Slite could be useful for scrapbooking (example use case: collecting tons of inspirational material for guide one's interior design directions for the company office; another is collecting a bunch of products for comparison before whittling down candidates for purchase), but it's unfortunately not. You can't even drag and drop files into the web page, and once you've uploaded a file or image to the page, it cannot be moved around or copied/pasted (!). Notion at least gets one kind of useful data model right, which is that of a wiki. Interlinking is, strangely enough, a buried feature (to you have to click on "Copy Link" of a page, then paste that, to get an inline link), but it's there.

toifiz 9y ago

Does it support offline mode ? In my company, the sales team is often int the customer's building (for example for a demo) and often there is no wifi or any internet connection. So, we're looking for a documentation system that can be synchronized when opened and works perfectly offline (including full-text search). At this moment, we are testing Microsoft OneNote.