I was one of the YC partners that decided to fund Slite. While I understand your concern, I can say from first hand experience, our decision didn't have anything to do with data.

We funded Slite because "another note app" might be a billion dollar company. "Another search engine" was Google, "another social network" was Facebook, and "another file storage service" was Dropbox.

Slite's plan is to charge users directly, similar to Slack. This has proven to be a great business model and means they won't need to resort to sneaky things like selling data.

Google, Facebook, and Dropbox were all quite different from their competitors from very early on.

I agree their business model could a the key to success, but from a user’s point of view, what is the reason that would make me want to pay for this new service? At a glance, it is quite similar to other note apps

Primarily, it's because it's designed to work for teams. Existing note apps are mostly built for individual usage and have sharing features bolted on.

Slite's value proposition is strongest in a mid-sized company, where you can model the organizational structure within the product.

Fair enough. I can appreciate that business model. Heck, I'm doing it myself. And I often tell my friends exactly what you've said - don't try and find something new just find something you can do much better (and then I point them to google, facebook, etc.).

My main reason for posting was because while I did understand why you'd start a business that did X better, I didn't necessarily think that would be enough to convince investors. I was wrong!

Short answer : absolutely not, you can have a look at our privacy policy here : https://slite.com/privacy.

On the why investors would fund us, I think the "note" aspect of it is misleading: it's simply giving an ease of use to our users, but the core of slite is the team aspect of it, and our will is to solve knowledge sharing in teams. While this is not solved, clearly investors will fund projects like Slite.

Sure enough looks like your privacy policy explicitly states that 3rd parties aren't going to be receiving our PERSONAL data. Thanks for the clarification. I think that covers one's worries about personal (identifiable data).

My point was more about data that is no longer personal. Couldn't you for example still collect and run analytics on user data, which you could sell to 3rd parties as generalized "hey people are talking about your product X"?

For instance maybe you track discussions about specific tools in the tech industry... Let's take IDEs as an example. You could build a portfolio of useful data to Microsoft about the sentiment toward their Visual Studio system.

I'm not saying you guys ARE doing that, I was just attempting to answer the question of why investors might opt to jump into this (crowded) space. I have no problem with that kind of data collection btw. It's the personal stuff I don't like :) . Whether you're collecting non-personal data doesn't really matter as long as you're not selling identifiable info (which your privacy policy clearly states you are not).

I know a couple of apps that could have that for strategy so I completely understand the question ;)

We have absolutely no plan on doing that, even for anonymized data. The only use of this data is for the application's purposes and to be honest if we could bring the same value with End to end encryption, we would do it.

The reason for not doing it is simple : we have a much simpler business model, Slite actually provides way enough value for active teams to start paying and that's enough to focus on ;)

Very cool, thanks for the explanation and best of luck to you guys!