Slite YCombinator Application

The first note app designed for teams

Slite brings transparency and accessibility to your team’s knowledge through notes, much like Slack brought transparency to your communication with chat.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qHUctCi0gwA

Christophe kicked off the first version of the project. The technical part of Slite is now lead by our 2 senior developers Pierre & Arnaud, both highly invested, while the product development is lead by Christophe.

As of today, I'm a solo founder and this situation suits me perfectly. This is especially true as I have already built an incredible team of 7 people with huge ownership on Slite and as I'm helped by great mentors, starting with the french startup studio eFounders. Having launched 2 startups with 3 cofounders, I know how hard it is to find the right co-founders. If in a near future I find someone with an entrepreneurial soul, fitting perfectly with the team and bringing essential value to Slite, It will be an evidence to incorporate her or him in the founding team.

As I'm a solo founder I will talk about one of my personal project, Wikiwars(wikiwars.co). It's a straightforward web app allowing you to play the Wiki game in real time with friends or strangers : you have to go as fast as possible from 1 page of wikipedia to another, using only internal links. The first challenge was to build entirely the app, from the conceptions to the development and design. The second unexpected challenge was to write a efficient script to find reachable pages in the vastness of wikipedia. Try it out and let me know if you enjoyed it ?!

I wrote the first line of code 1 year ago, and the journey has been incredible. In a year, we designed and developed a real-time desktop app with a full-featured collaborative editor, with no technical debt. We built an incredible team with the right skills in product and development. I kicked-off Slite technically, built the first version of it, and found Pierre and Arnaud, our 2 first senior developers. They had respectively built a chrome note editor with more than 50K users and a B2B collaborative business plan editor. More than their technical skills and experience, the cornerstone of Slite has been our human fit. We launched our private beta 5 months ago, and with no public communication, we have a gathered a great set of beta testers, companies from 3 to 120 users, giving us incredibly useful feedback. It allowed us to fix the remaining weaknesses of the product in order to launch our public beta in October. To handle this, we are now a team of 7, with 4 amazing developers, a sales, a marketing person, and myself handling the product.

Full-time, I have hard times being part-time on something ?

We launched our private beta to a limited set of pilots 5 months ago and we currently have 400+ active users spread among 50+ teams. Interesting fact: we both onboarded small teams and SMBs. Our largest by far, ABTasty, has more than 100 users active on Slite.

Slite is funded and benefits from the thorough help of eFounders, a startup studio that previously accelerated Front & Hivy among others.

I launched Slite because note is an evidence to me. Like Chat went from private sphere to business sphere with software like Slack, I'm convinced Note will spread from consumer to businesses. Note is more than writing, it's holding our personal knowledge, and nothing is as powerful as sharing knowledge. That's why we're building Slite: to have 1 place for teams to make the content that matters to them both transparent and easily accessible.

Slite replaces all the tools you use to write content that matters: Word, Google Doc, wikis, the list is long. The biggest change is that we're bringing the ease of use & access of notes to teams, and therefore giving them a go-to tool to write things down and a clear view of what exactly had been written by their teammates.

Word processors focus on independent docs, Slite is all about the big picture. And when Wikis see knowledge as static, Slite sees in it all the information that matters, and retains value over time. In short, for the first time an app makes the bridge between all the information that matters across a team, wether it's processes, how-tos, day-to-day learnings, meeting minutes, or whatever brings value to the rest of the team. And Slite leverages the power of notes to make this information clear for everyone.

We have 3 types of competitors : - word processors that are becoming more and more collaborative among which Dropbox Paper, Google docs and Word - wikis like Confluence & google Site - And eventually hybrid tools like Quip & Notion, trying to solve project management and knowledge while making documents evolve

We'll sell Slite on a pay-per-user model, starting at 10$/user/month. The potential here is really similar to Slack's, as we intend to be the obvious choice for SMBs up to 500 people 5 years from now.

Our first customers are tech companies from 3 to 200 users. 2 very simple ways of sourcing them is to target Slack's paying users as well as companies relying on remote teams.

Really not for right now but at some point in the future I'll build the next generation of remote tool, allowing with a set of mixed reality & 360 cameras to get the proximity effect you have with your teammate across the desk. While it's really still in my mind, I'd be happy to be challenged on this one!

As I was working on a previous side project & getting into deep learning methods, I discovered the Word2Vec Libraries. Those are the equivalent of image recognition algorithms for text, and go way further: they let you modelize words in such a way that sentences and their meaning can be mathematically explained. For instance, it will give you in output : Obama = Poutine + US - Russia That's not by chance I chose this example, at some point this algorithm could create a lot of intelligence within your Slite usage.

Feedback from startups that went through it. It feels like a must for companies like Slite that need to be mainstream super fast. Plus, after having exchanged with Alumni, I have the sensation YC makes a lot of sense in 2 different cases: companies with the right energy but that need to pivot, and companies with a beginning of product market fit, ready to deploy really fast. Slite is definitely in this phase, and YC could be gamechanger for us.

It's all over the startup ecosystem