
Launch HN: Slite (YC W18) – Note App for Teams - christophepas
Hi HN! I&#x27;m Chris, founder of Slite (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;slite.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;slite.com</a>). We’re building a tool for modern teams to write down and retrieve things that matter.<p>I&#x27;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.<p>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.<p>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: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=16355454" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=16355454</a>.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>With these basic differences we&#x27;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.<p>It’s an exciting time and we’d love for you to check it out and give us your feedback. And we&#x27;re eager to hear your ideas in this space. Please share your thoughts in the comments!
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alexjray
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.

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

~~~
pedalpete
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.

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tarr11
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
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.

------
joebo
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
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.

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gregwebs
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-
altern...](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)

~~~
AnnoyingSwede
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.

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samiralajmovic
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
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
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)?

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andrew_wc_brown
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.

~~~
tommoor
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
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.

------
sebleon
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!

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

~~~
christophepas
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.

------
AndrewConn
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.

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ckluis
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
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.

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

~~~
christophepas
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.

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elvinyung
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
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
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
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!

~~~
ianstormtaylor
Thanks! Glad to hear it :D happy to answer any questions if you do.

That makes sense re: teams, thanks!

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

------
grvdrm
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
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.

------
CocoaGeek
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
Hey there, totally legitimate concern, I'll just say without spoiling that
we're really here for the long run ;)

~~~
CocoaGeek
Great, glad to read that 8)

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danvoell
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
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.

------
goertzen
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
Super sorry for the experience this has been now fixed (it's actually a
relicate, the issue can't happen on new teams)

~~~
goertzen
Great! And great job fielding these questions/comments.

------
marlonmisra
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.

------
toifiz
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.

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

~~~
christophepas
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.

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goertzen
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
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
It's fixed, again sorry about that!

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

~~~
tommoor
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)

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

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

------
viperscape
Looks like OneNote [http://onenote.com](http://onenote.com)

------
sAbakumoff
>We’re building a tool for modern teams to write down and retrieve things that
matter.

Do you re-invent paper?

------
ramon
What about Evernote Business?

------
lobster_johnson
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.

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

------
aviv
Does this do anything that Quip doesn't?

~~~
christophepas
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.

