Hello again! π
First, thank you so much to everyone that supported our launch of IO last week (https://www.producthunt.com/post...). We can't wait to build more features for you!
Today we're opening up signups and officially launching **Bold**: An internal blog for your team. βοΈ
You might be asking: Why does my company need an internal blog and what is the difference between Bold and other products like Google Docs, Dropbox Paper, Notion, etc?
Great question. π We love real-time collaboration products like those mentioned above and believe they are useful for many use cases.
Yet, we realized that a simple ownership model is best when it comes to sharing ideas and domain knowledge within an organization. Over time, this will build an archive of progress available to everyone on your team.
Slack is the fastest way to communicate with your team, while Bold is the most thoughtful way. To that end, we've integrated deeply with Slack to make adopting Bold effortless.
Head over to https://bold.co to try out a free trial with your team and keep the feedback coming, we're listening!
Note: IO and Bold are powered by the same underlying technology stack, but serve different audiences. We will continue to work hard to improve both for our readers and writers.
Thank you! π
(some more info: https://medium.com/@davidbyttow/...)
@davidbyttow Congrats David. I am excited to see how this product plays out. When I used it for the first time, I was very impressed by how novel the concept of ambience music and assistants in a publishing product. There is no doubt that this product will get compared with Medium for personal usage and Docs/Dropbox/Slack Notes for internal company communications. But, given your track record and what I know about how you think about products from your blog, I am sure you have already foreseen all those comparisons and have already incorporated that in your roadmap. After all, both Slack & Medium succeeded despite the presence of strong players and existing behaviors in their respective spaces.
Two quick points/questions. How much does it cost? Free trials are pointless if a service costs something that we'd never pay for. And does signing up with Slack notify the team at all? I'd love to be able to play around with this before the need to signup, as I'm not sure it's something we'd use just yet. Thanks! Beautiful landing page.
@traf Hey James, appreciate the kind words! Bold Pro is $5/user a month. You're absolutely right that the pricing should be explicit; we're working to remedy that right now. In the meantime, feel free to sign upβwe won't ask for a CC upfront or notify your team (promise).
This is awesome and I could see myself integrating this for internal documentation for a few teams. I would be keen to know how private the data that is recorded here is e.g., is BOLD able to view posts by users? I say this because some company information could be sensitive. What security is in place?
@ptrko Hi Patrick. Few things here as the acting CTO.
First, nobody can view the posts easily because all content is encrypted at rest in our database and text content is NOT redundantly copied to other places (e.g., redshift, etc). We are not in the business (nor do we want to be) of reading any content by our users, this is extremely important. We use all of the best practices when it comes to securing both our internal systems (AWS) and employees' access to them (2FA, MFA, etc).
Second, we do not retrieve or ask for any content access to your Slack messages and only request access to public channel names.
Hope that helps!
@desmonddantzler Hey Desmond, we're huge fans of Notion and similar products like Paper. While those products are great for real-time collaboration, we find that a single-author model works best for sharing ideas, news, and knowledge with your team. Bold is more akin to an internal blog rather than a documents app :)
@sirbenlee@desmonddantzler definitely fans of Notion! I think we are trying to assist teams in different ways as Ben mentioned earlier.
I feel like I can build a whole knowledge product for my team within Notion, and I think for that reason we have different goals.
Congrats on the launch David, Ben, and Jim!
For all the product builders out here, how do you think about launching/building two separate products at the same time - what are you testing / what are the biggest KPIs ?
@eriktorenberg thanks for the kind words!
Even though the use cases are different, the products share the same core technology. The intent is to explore which aspects are the most useful, and take our learnings to continue to improve on our offering. At the end of the day like most creators, we love building what people need/want.
We get good metrics such as # of posts made, company sign ups, and # of co-workers joined. Most company specific behaviors are more opaque because we can't reach into each company for specifics, but we feel bullish that people will jump on our Slack community and share all of the needs, wants and desires they may have.
This is very neat!
We just spun up a forked/private instance of Hashrocket's TIL project https://til.hashrocket.com/ and it's been pretty fun so far for internal knowledge sharing and quick tips.
I love the idea of internal collab in different ways than wikis.
@jpatcourtney I think that a blog format is easier to parse when new team members want to get an understanding of how the team has changed / grown over the years. It becomes really cool when you are able to see turning points, fun events, product launches, etc. A wiki at times feels like a place to throw information / deliverables and forget about it.
@jpatcourtney Hey John, great question.
Wikis are great for housing institutional knowledge, but didn't fit the bill for our other needsβmainly thoughtful and transparent communication within teams.
We've found that wikis typically require an active effort to build up, maintain, and organize. With Bold, a historical archive and knowledge base organically forms when a team publishes their memos, ideas, product spec, etc. This becomes invaluable when combined with search.
@alpennec@davidbyttow there are a lot of great tools out there for solving the wiki problem. In contrast, we have a hybrid approach that brings together a lot of concepts that people want. It should be easy to debate issues, share a cool idea, and land new employees somewhere they can catch up and get acclimated to how people share ideas.
All the while trying to stay as simple as possible π»
Hello! I think bold is awesome, definitely better than telegraph. But, I too, would like to have an option to "publish" private posts, because this is especially great for drafting ideas and sending links to colleagues. How well these published posts show up in google currently?
Other thing, I cannot save as draft after I have published, can I?
Scandinavian ΓΓ€ΓΓΆ characters are not working on Firefox, see screenshot:
Good job!
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