Stashpada developer-focused “DM to yourself”-style laptop app is now spinning off into a docs app you can use without signing in. The company will continue to keep its original notes app and call it “Stashpad Lists.”
StashPad Documents is the company’s new offering that requires no login and supports Markdown formatting. The product is browser first and document history is stored locally so users can search for documents without asking the server. The company said that while there’s no offline support right now, it’s a feature the startup will introduce in the future.
You can easily share these documents for others to view and collaborate on. However, some of the features like read-only sharing are behind a login. While most of the features are free to use, people have to pay for professional features like limited access and priority support. The company prices the Pro plan at $12 per month, or $8 per month if you pay annually.
The company said collaboration is an important use case for the docs product, as it claims to support real-time interactions with less than 50 milliseconds of latency.
Why the pivot?
The startup, which has raised $2 million to date, told TechCrunch that it didn’t see expected growth with its note-taking product as the audience for it was too limited.
While building collaboration features for the note-taking app, the company’s co-founder and CEO Cara Borenstein found that there was a greater demand for a Google Docs-like use case when working with others.
“As we began adding multiplayer features to our original product, we conducted a series of user interviews to understand how engineering teams manage notes and documents in a collaborative environment,” he said in an email.
“One thing that struck us is how, even when teams had an official team wiki (using tools like Confluence or Notion), they still often resorted to Google Docs for a variety of use cases. They might even without fully recognizing that Google Docs remains a large part of their workflow.”
With this new product, Stashpad aims to appeal to both technical and non-technical users. Additionally, he sees an enterprise-sized opportunity for the docs product.
