On September 27th 2017, Shelf is launching its knowledge sharing solution on Product Hunt. For all of you who are new to Shelf, we offer a content sharing platform that helps distributed teams organize, declutter, and instantly find their most important resources in one place.
Why are we so interested in helping distributed teams? Because our startup was distributed from the beginning. Since Day 1, we’ve had offices in different parts of the world, and the use of web technologies and cloud platforms is baked into our company DNA. But it goes even deeper than that. Even before Shelf came into existence, the founding team spent years working in similar setups and building knowledge management platforms. We developed everything from SharePoint sites to custom portals, and the feedback from end users was always the same. They found them to be too complex, visually unappealing, and the most frequent comment of all was that it’s really hard to find stuff.
These are the experiences we drew from when creating Shelf. We said to ourselves, “Enough is enough. We’re going to create a better, cheaper, easier way to share the things that are most important to distributed teams.” But we didn’t try to solve this problem on our own. We set out to understand the science behind good organizing; we consulted with Harvard Business School librarians, knowledge management gurus, change management experts, and information architects. The combination of our first-hand experiences and this deep domain expertise allowed us to build something that is truly easy-to-use, affordable, and that actually gets the job done. We’re excited to share it with the world!
Shelf is certainly not the first technology to focus on improving the knowledge sharing experience. There are platforms like SharePoint and Atlassian’s Confluence that also offer solutions, but we take a different approach. First off, Shelf offers a much more powerful search engine that lets users search inside of documents and images and filter by tags, badges, location, and exact dates. This means that you can always find what you’re looking for when you need it.
Second, Shelf allows you to organize all kinds of information in a single location. Valuable content exists in many different formats — YouTube videos, PDFs, blog posts, cloud-based documents, LinkedIn profiles, and the list goes on. At Shelf, we think you shouldn’t have to jump from digital space to digital space to find what you’re looking for. We offer a single place to organize all your different resources so important stuff doesn’t get lost or buried.
Sharing Shelf on Product Hunt is an exciting moment for us. Yes, it will be nice to raise our company profile and bring new visitors to the site but the most exciting thing will be to see what the practitioners in the community have to say. Our guess is that a lot of these folks have experience working as part of a distributed team. The challenge of finding important content when you need it is becoming universal at this point, so it will be great to hear what’s working and what isn’t from this passionate community of technologists.
In light of this, we’re happy to announce that we’re offering a 25% discount to everyone in the Product Hunt community who signs up before 11:59PM PST on September 28th. The best part about this promo is that Shelf is already free to use for up to four people. This means that you and your coworkers can take the time to you need to check out the product, decide if it suits your larger knowledge sharing needs, and if you decide that it does, your 25% discount will be there, waiting for you!
Thanks to everyone who helped make this happen, and thank you in advance to the PH community for the warm welcome!
Sincerely,
Sedarius, Tobias, Colin, and the rest of the Shelf Team
