Stashpad, a developer-focused “DM to yourself”-styled notebook app, is now pivoting to a docs app that you can use without logging in. The company will still maintain its original notes app and call it “Stashpad Lists.”
StashPad Docs is the company’s new offering that doesn’t require any login and supports Markdown formatting. The product is browser first and document history is stored locally, so users can search for docs without querying the server. The company said that while there is no offline support at the moment, it is a feature that the startup will introduce in the future.
You can easily share these docs for others to look at and collaborate with. However, some of the features like read-only sharing are behind a login. While most of the features are free to use, people have to pay for pro features like restricted access and priority support. The company is pricing the Pro plan at $12 per month or $8 per month if you pay annually.
The company said that collaboration is a major use case for the docs product as it claims to support real-time interactions with less than 50 milliseconds of delay.
Why the pivot?
The startup, which has raised $2 million to date, told TechCrunch that it didn’t see expected growth with the note-taking product as the audience for it was too narrow.
When building collaboration features for the note-taking app, the company’s co-founder and CEO Cara Borenstein found that there is a bigger demand for a Google Docs-like use case when working with others.
“As we embarked on adding multiplayer functionality to our original product, we did a number of user interviews to understand how engineering teams manage notes and docs in a collaborative setting,” she said in an email.
“One thing that struck us is how, even when teams had an official team wiki in place (using tools like Confluence or Notion), still they would often 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.”
With this new product, Stashpad aims to attract both technical and non-technical users. Plus, it sees a venture-sized opportunity for the docs product.
