Good morning, afternoon, or evening. ICYMI: We interviewed serial maker and investor Karthik Puvvada in our newest newsletter, Maker Stacks. Check it out.
Here’s the news:
📹 D-Day for TikTok as Congress has passed a bill that could ban the app.
🚀 Space X successfully launched its Starship rocket on its third attempt.
📸 Instagram is working on a new remix-style feature for Reels.
We love a good pivot here at Product Hunt. I mean, who doesn’t? Some of the biggest names in tech today happened because a founder was brave enough to switch direction. Take Figma, for example. Did you know it was originally a drone company?
Stashpad was originally launched back in 2022 as a developer-focused notepad. Its interface is kind of like a “DM to yourself” with each note taking on the appearance of a message, complete with a typical bubble container, date, and time stamps. It raised around $2 million for its efforts from investors like Will Larson (CTO at Carta).
Fast forward to today, and the company has decided to roll the dice and pivot by launching a developer-oriented, minimal alternative to Google Docs.
It’s called Stashpad Docs. It needs no login, supports Markdown formatting, is browser first, and it stores document history locally, so users can search for their docs without having to query the server.
When you decide to start a new doc, simply type “stash.new” into your address bar, and the app will immediately pop up and prompt you to start writing. You can collaborate with teammates by simply sharing the link. Once in, you can both write, comment, format and even grab each other's attention with a wave emoji.
Why the pivot? In an interview with Techcrunch, CEO Cara Borenstein said it was a combination of not seeing enough growth with the team’s original offering, and while building collaboration features, they discovered there was a bigger demand among their users for a Google Docs alternative.
“One thing that struck us is how, even when teams had an official team wiki in place (using tools like Confluence or Notion), they would still resort to Google Docs for a variety of use-cases. They might do so even without fully acknowledging that Google Docs remains a big part of their workflow,” she said.
If you’re grieving for the company’s original offering, don’t fret — it will live on but with a new name: Stashpad Lists.
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