Stashpad, a “DM to yourself” style notes app for developers, is pivoting into a documentation app that can be used without logging in. The company will continue to maintain its original Notes app and call it “Stashpad Lists.”
StashPad Docs is a new product from the company that doesn't require a login and supports Markdown format. The product is browser-first and document history is stored locally, allowing users to search for documents without contacting the server. The company said that there is no offline support at this time, but this is a feature that the startup will introduce in the future.
Easily share these documents for others to view and collaborate on. However, some features, such as read-only sharing, are behind login. Most features are free to use, but you have to pay for professional features like restricted access and priority support. The company prices its Pro plan at $12 per month, or $8 per month if paid annually.
The company said collaboration is a key use case for the docs product, as it claims to support real-time interactions with less than 50ms of latency.
Why pivot?
The startup, which has raised $2 million so far, told TechCrunch that the note-taking product's target audience is too narrow to see the growth it hopes for.
When building the note-taking app's collaboration features, company co-founder and CEO Cara Borenstein said she saw a growing demand for Google Docs-like use cases when collaborating with others. I noticed.
“When we set out to add multiplayer functionality to our original product, we conducted numerous user interviews to understand how engineering teams manage notes and documents in a collaborative environment. ” she said in an email.
“One thing that struck us was that even when teams have official team wikis (using tools like Confluence and Notion), they still rely on Google Docs for various use cases. They may do so without fully realizing that Google Docs is still an important part of their workflow.”
With this new product, Stashpad aims to attract both technical and non-technical users. Additionally, the company sees venture-scale opportunities for its docs product.