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.
Short answer : absolutely not, you can have a look at our privacy policy here : 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.
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).
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 ;)
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.
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.
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.
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!
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!
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.
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.
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.
