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When Andy Cook and Nelson Joyce were at HubSpot, building an internal startup within the Cambridge marketing tech company, they had a problem not all of there coworkers were facing. Because their group, LeadIn, was basically taking some of HubSpot's best features and turning them into a free product, they wanted some distance from employees outside of their team when it came to sharing information.
"One thing it’s really good for is unlocking team knowledge that already exists."
Cook said HubSpot employees generally use Confluence, team collaboration software, "to store more concrete knowledge," ranging from financials to company announcements, Cook said. So, he and Joyce tried to find their own system to share information within the the LeadIn team. They couldn't find anything reliable that could serve the needs of a small team, prompting the idea for their new wiki software startup, Tettra.
Cook and Joyce started working on Tettra after they left HubSpot in early October last year to pursue the idea. They have since made a mini-pivot, going from developing their own standalone wiki platform to something that directly integrates with team-communication app Slack, which recently released a bunch of new APIs to make those kinds of integrations easier.
"Trying to get organizations to adopt a new tool is really difficult. Almost all the companies we talked to were already using Slack," Cooks told BostInno—so it made sense to develop a tool that directly integrated with the app, which has become very popular with companies, large and small.
Tettra, which went into beta Wednesday, works by hooking into your Slack account and then generating a wiki based on all the documents and conversations within your channels. The idea, Cook and Joyce said, is that it can be difficult to stay on top of all the documents that are being uploaded to Slack, especially if you're a new employee coming in. Tettra's interface neatly sorts all of the documents and conversations, and any additions you make will be reflected right back in Slack.
"One thing it’s really good for is unlocking team knowledge that already exists," Cook said.
The startup's beta is free for companies under 10 team members, but it will cost teams larger than that $2 per user a month after a free 30-day trial. Pricing is subject to change.
"Our goal right now is to find companies that want to be in the beta and use the product and then iterate on it as fast as posible using feedback from those companies," Cook said, adding that the startup is initially aiming for companies with smaller teams, with about 20 employees or fewer. "They will have a lot of say in what these products become."
"They will have a lot of say in what these products become."
This isn't the first or second time Cook and Joyce have worked together. In fact, they became friends in the seventh grade and, years later, first started working together when Cook was running Rentabilities, the startup he co-founded with his brother Alex—Nelson had joined as an employee and eventually went on to work at HubSpot. After HubSpot acquired Rentabilities in 2013, Cook joined the company with his brother. David Cancel, the CEO of Driftt who was HubSpot's chief product officer at the time, knew Cook and Joyce were good friends, so he teamed them up together.
Cook and Joyce are currently bootstrapping Tettra with their own savings right now, and they're working out of a small office in Union Square in Somerville. Cook said they'll assess the funding situation as they go along.
Joyce said one of the general trends the startup is following is the growing amount of transparency within companies, something they experienced while working at HubSpot with documents flowing in and out of Confluence. With Tettra, Joyce said he and Cook are looking to build a tool that will allow smaller teams to share important information in a more effective way, letting the next generation of companies be more transparent with their employees.
"I feel like it’s a shift that’s happening more broadly," he said.
