6 ms·

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....

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).
    - christophepas 9y ago
      I know a couple of apps that could have that for strategy so I completely understand the question ;) 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 ;)
      - rubicon33 9y ago
        Very cool, thanks for the explanation and best of luck to you guys!
- snowmaker 9y ago
  I was one of the YC partners that decided to fund Slite. While I understand your concern, I can say from first hand experience, our decision didn't have anything to do with data. 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.
  - rubicon33 9y ago
    Fair enough. I can appreciate that business model. Heck, I'm doing it myself. And I often tell my friends exactly what you've said - don't try and find something new just find something you can do much better (and then I point them to google, facebook, etc.). 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!
  - echevil 9y ago
    Google, Facebook, and Dropbox were all quite different from their competitors from very early on. 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
    - snowmaker 9y ago
      Primarily, it's because it's designed to work for teams. Existing note apps are mostly built for individual usage and have sharing features bolted on. Slite's value proposition is strongest in a mid-sized company, where you can model the organizational structure within the product.
rokhayakebe 9y ago
Another note app ...... with 4000 teams using the product
- pedalpete 9y ago
  I'm not denying they have 4000 teams using the product, but YC has an internal tool, so getting YC companies on board which have multiple teams per company, I think you'd reach 4000 quite quickly. 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.
- jonathankoren 9y ago
  How big are these teams? How active are they? 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.
mdip 9y ago
> Another note app? [...snip...] dropbox, notion, google . . . 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] (:
foka86 9y ago
Hi guys! 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 :).

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).
  - christophepas 9y ago
    I know a couple of apps that could have that for strategy so I completely understand the question ;) 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 ;)
    - rubicon33 9y ago
      Very cool, thanks for the explanation and best of luck to you guys!
snowmaker 9y ago
I was one of the YC partners that decided to fund Slite. While I understand your concern, I can say from first hand experience, our decision didn't have anything to do with data. 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.
- rubicon33 9y ago
  Fair enough. I can appreciate that business model. Heck, I'm doing it myself. And I often tell my friends exactly what you've said - don't try and find something new just find something you can do much better (and then I point them to google, facebook, etc.). 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!
- echevil 9y ago
  Google, Facebook, and Dropbox were all quite different from their competitors from very early on. 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
  - snowmaker 9y ago
    Primarily, it's because it's designed to work for teams. Existing note apps are mostly built for individual usage and have sharing features bolted on. Slite's value proposition is strongest in a mid-sized company, where you can model the organizational structure within the product.

rokhayakebe 9y ago

Another note app ...... with 4000 teams using the product

pedalpete 9y ago
I'm not denying they have 4000 teams using the product, but YC has an internal tool, so getting YC companies on board which have multiple teams per company, I think you'd reach 4000 quite quickly. 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.
jonathankoren 9y ago
How big are these teams? How active are they? 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.

mdip 9y ago

> Another note app? [...snip...] dropbox, notion, google . . . 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] (:

foka86 9y ago

Hi guys! 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 :).