Whenever we introduce someone to our product, after the initial round of awes 😊, we are asked about our story, startup world code for what is that made us want to build this product. While planning the launch of our blog we thought it would be best to lead with a post that tells everyone the story that drove us to create Snipply.
Snipply was born out of our personal collaboration frustrations. Before starting Snipply we were product builders. We delivered products to budding startups all the way up to Fortune 500 organizations. Everyone uses different tools — think Word vs Docs, Excel vs Sheets, Dropbox vs Box or Illustrator vs Sketch — to do pretty much the same thing. Collaborating is hard enough with internal teams, now imagine having to coordinate and please everyone when you add external team members. At any point in time, between our client’s tools, our team’s tools and freelancers we brought onto our project, we would waist more than half of our time managing our work rather than doing what we were hired to do, delivering products that our clients loved 💙.
This nightmare was our reality and we wanted to do something to end it. We started off doing what we always do when we build a new product, discovery, with the hope that there was a solution on the market that solves our problems. After going through hundreds of products including cloud file storage, workspaces (Notion, Slab, Slite, Coda), and productivity suites (Office, G Suite, Quip) we kept falling short of finding something that met all the stakeholders’ needs. During that process one thing became clear, each product had its set of supporters. This made sense since as individuals we all have our own set of requirements that drive the preferences in the tools we chose to use to do our work. What we didn’t expect was that people’s reasoning, as to why they didn’t want to try or switch their tool, would be more driven by emotional attachments than rational reasoning.
Realizing that emotions were behind people’s preferences we knew that there was no way that we could find or build a tool that would solve our collaboration woes 🤬. We were giving in to the realization that we will spend the rest of our professional lives dealing with these issues 😩.
That is when we had our aha moment! 🤩
We asked ourselves what if we could make these tools talk to one another 🤯. Wouldn’t it be cool if everyone could use their favorite tool and collaborate with anyone else using their favorite tool, even live? It would eliminate the workflow friction and other negatives we associate with our tools being fragmented, like switching between them, converting content, formating, or learning new tools only to go back to what you prefer once the work is done.
That is why we are building Snipply. We are focused on making this vision a reality with documents, spreadsheets, and presentation editors. Starting with Microsoft Office and Google G Suite, we are bridging content between Excel, Sheets, Word, and Docs. It will allow users to do their work in Excel and collaborate on the same content with someone using Sheets or Word or Docs, even live. In the near future we will be adding Slides and PowerPoint based on demand, and eventually expanding to other document processors, spreadsheets and presentations software.
Suffering from editor fragmentation and collaboration headaches resulting from it? Love using Excel but hate Sheets? Want to put an end to your team’s friction over Office and G Suite? Join our waitlist here.
