We wanted to search everything in our company — so we built it
From a failed product to a new search solution that saves us a day — every month.
Last summer we shut down our previous product — Pipetop. What went wrong? —What didn’t! We were in a very crowded market, lacked major product differentiation and relied too heavily on big social platforms for data. Don’t copy us!
Knowledge/information management is broken
Instead of closing down the company, we decided to give it another go with a fresh idea. One of the problems we’ve long been frustrated with is how knowledge/information is shared (and mainly lost) within organisations.
For example: every day we all embark on internal info seeking missions. We first furiously look for information everywhere and eventually email/slack or … just shoulder tap a co-worker. (IDC research claims that we waste up to 5 hours each week on these kind of info hunts.)
But in theory the questions we want to answer don’t seem that complicated:
- Where is the report that Stefano wrote last week (of course I forgot its name)?
- Who is responsible for managing our FAQ?
- What is the mobile phone number of my colleague Ana?
- What’s the deal status with Company XY?
- When and what was the last touch point with Account XY?
- What were the top 3 candidates for the last customer support position?
- What’s the basic info on the Customer XY that is right now calling me and what did she last do in our app?
- What’s our standard answer to this sales prospect question? And who is the expert on this topic in our organisation?
- What is the description of that Jira issue again?
🙋 1st solution or Why Wikis don’t work
Our first attempt at the solution looked like a spin on traditional Wikis with a bit of Quora on top. Co-workers would ask questions in different categories and internal knowledge experts would answer them.
We were testing an early prototype, but a few things started to bother us:
- Steep onboarding curve: quick population of the first 15–20 quality answers was critical for internal success. And even then: isn’t it just another place where information goes to die?
- It would only cover about 50% of internal knowledge questions from the above list — what about all the information residing in all our other cloud applications?
- Lack of daily habit: Based on the previous point, it was hard for us to imagine that an individual user could use our app on a daily basis.
Is there a better way? Could we enable employees to browse through internal company knowledge in without introducing a new data silo?
“Well, what about search? A search tool that in a simple way connects all our existing data silos? A tool as simple as Google is for consumers.”
Long story short: we began testing this spark of an idea with a landing page and a bit later with a simple prototype. The amazing Algolia product enabled us to get to initial prototype in a matter weeks instead of months. Based on the amazingly positive initial feedback and active daily usage, we decided to double down on it 👍.
Introducing Cuely and opening of our private beta
Cuely securely connects to your company cloud apps and enables your team to search across all of them — all within an elegant Mac application (for now). Yup, Cuely is Spotlight on steroids.
Imagine — you are now one click or keyboard shortcut away from searching and browsing through every piece of information in your company cloud applications.
Within Cuely you can for example:
- Search your company documents, sheets, presentations (not only titles, but also authors and text contents),
- Type in a name of your your colleague and see her latest documents, sales deals they’ve worked on, customer support tickets,
- Browse and search through your hiring candidates and their basic information, messages exchanged with your company, etc.
- Type the name of the company that your co-worker is pursuing a deal with and see all crucial information and conversations from your CRM,
- and much more…
We now observed that the end result not only helps us save time - it even has some less expected productivity side-effects:
- We rely on search instead of browser tabs: everything is now a quick search away so we are more prone to close unnecessary browser tabs. Sometimes we don’t even have to open them up, because we access the information needed from the Cuely preview pane on the right.
- We look up metrics more often: we use Intercom to log usage data and because we can access our Intercom users through Cuely, we are now just a simply query (“users” or “intercom”) away from our usage info.
- We don’t disturb our co-workers: because information is much easier to find, we eliminated most of the unnecessary shoulder taps: “Where is that doc you send me last week? How is that deal working out? Did you answer support ticket #125? How do we answer these SLA questions again?”
Soon — your company and team can enjoy the same superpower.
CUELY IS TODAY ENTERING PRIVATE BETA — SIGN UP ON OUR WEBSITE TO GET IN LINE!
How will company “Search” of the future look like?
While we are starting out with a simple initial product, we envision not-too-distant future in which solutions like ours become smarter and start merging information from different systems.
Here are a few more complex questions that we should eventually be able to answer:
- Search through past project in the company: be able to see how long they took, how much they cost, who worked on them, which are all the documents associated with them…
- See whole customer journey without expensive, manual API stitching: from how they became your customer, which were the touch points along the way, how much have you spent servicing them, how much revenue they’ve brought in…
- Type in the name of your colleague and see everything about her: how she joined the company, who interviewed her, how long she’s been at the company, projects she’s worked on, what is she an expert in, who she reports to…
For us — this stuff is really exciting. And obviously useful. Google has spoiled us with its magical public search engine — yet we have nothing even remotely similar for our work life. Such shame.
IF YOU AGREE WITH US, SIGN UP FOR OUR PRIVATE BETA. 🔍
