We’ve launched Haystack on Product Hunt today to save you 30+ minutes a day
It’s been about 6 months since we fully committed to try to solve the problems of “Where is that document”, “Which is the right version of the document” and “How do I find out how to do X”.
And today we have launched Haystack into the world here.
The Problem
We started Haystack to solve these problems, originally looking at it as a process problem (we had just created a process training tool after all) but later realized it’s a search problem. While working at Google I had 0 interest in how search worked… Why? Because it’s both a really hard problem and also I was unlikely to be able to make that big of a change if I ever worked on it.
Search, by itself isn’t interesting, it’s what you do after the search that matters. And actually, the bit that happens before a search is interesting because that’s why you decide what and why you need it. So really it comes down to:
Intent -> Search -> Action
But most people never think of this middle bit, in fact, in your ideal world you never think about it. When you are looking for a website, recipe or piece of information on Google, you don’t really think about the complexity of how Google delivers that, you think I need X, I write that in Y, and then I get X in return… simple to you, highly complex to them.
So what did we build?
After about 5 complete rebuilds, we settled on building a Chrome Extension that worked directly in your browser, so where you think of Google for ‘Information’, our goal was for Haystack to be where you went for starting or continuing to work.
We wanted an easy way for people to use it. So to bring it up so we settled on a keyboard shortcut (Control + Spacebar — similar to the Macs Spotlight Shortcut), a button that you could press or a beautiful new tab screen you could just type into.
We wanted a way to remind people about it. which is hard when your goal is to be privacy centric and not store any data about people! So we took over peoples new tabs, in the hope they would use it for a few weeks until they had built up the habit.
We wanted search to be instant. So we took your most common documents and built a small search engine directly on your computer, we used an indexing system to make this even smaller and faster as well.
We wanted to be privacy centric. That meant not storing any data in the cloud, just storing it in your computer, so we built a database system in your Chrome Extension as well, that kept itself clean and fast.
We wanted our search to show information before you opened the document. So we created instant previews and easily scanable information about the document (like images of the people that had created/edited them).
We wanted to be able to search anything. So we made an easy way for us to add integrations, but also added history search for the applications we had yet to add. We also built ways to search websites that you wanted to go to direct (Linkedin, Google, Amazon…etc) with a simple slash (‘/’).
We wanted it to work with spelling mistakes. Most people don’t type perfectly, especially when they are not sure what they want, so we built a way that if you searched for “heystack” then “haystack” would still show up.
We wanted to ensure you could find documents you didn’t know the name of. So we built a system that didn’t just search the title but the content of the document.
We didn’t expect we would be the best of search straight away. So we show you the results directly from your search accounts as if you had searched manually yourself, that way if we don’t find the result, chances are that your document or file location would.
We wanted a clear way to fund it. So we create a professional version that allowed you to search across all your sales and marketing tools, aggregate it together and offer a 360 view of the customer.
We wanted a way to open a ‘project’ of tools together. So we created collections, a way for you to organise your content, search in those collections or open the entire collection in a project as well.
We wanted you to love it. So we created a farmer character (who has a hidden name you can find in the code), that guides you through the process and will appear at fun times as well.
So did we built it?
You bet your ass we did! And that’s why I’m so happy to launch it to the world, you can access it here:
So how does it save me 30+ minutes a day?
Most of you are probably thinking… I’m pretty productive, and chances are you are, but most people underestimate how much of their day is spent searching for information.
According to a McKinsey study most of us we spend 20% of our time looking for and sharing information.
Crazy, right? I spent a day checking this on myself and was able to manually work out about 10% of my time was looking and sharing stuff for my team. That excludes time I didn’t notice it, and the effect on my productivity that the interruptions caused on me.
That’s 2 hours a day, so if we only reduced this by 1/4 we have saved you that time. Right now I think it saves me 30 minutes and I don’t even spend as much time as I used to in documents these days!
How can I help?
There are 3 things you can do to help!
- Send us feedback! Tools only get better if we know what is wrong with them or how they can get better!
- Use it more! The more you use it, the more feedback you’ll want to give us to make it even better.
- Tell your friends! The more people that use it, the more feedback we get, the better it gets. Please share your this link with people on your social networks.
Already got feedback! Please add it below, add it on Product Hunt or send me a message on twitter,
Thanks for reading and so happy to get this in your hands!
Charles Douglas-Osborn
Haystack, CEO
