44 products left, but today glean

Hi friend 👋,

This is the age of software as a service. For a normal workday, I can think of dozens of different software as a service (SaaS) applications. And almost all of the tools provide interfaces through which we can document things. Consider the following: Atlassian tools, G Suite or Office365, Salesforce, Notion, Github, Asana, Miro, Gong, Intercom, Trello, Looker, and more. The tools I mentioned in here could be utilized by a single organization with multiple teams. Consider now the person who wishes to review a feature that was introduced six months ago in order to evaluate its current standing. Before anything else, she should look at the feature doc(Notion) and possibly the analysis docs(Confluence) which has a mention of the Miro board. The next step is for her to learn how customers are responding and putting it to use. How many customers asked for this function from Intercom or Gong? How many customers are using it right now? Check Salesforce or Looker. What about bugs from Github or Jira? Isn't that the truth, how difficult it is? Now, think about all of the internal docs you have, they are all over the place.

These tools are here to make our lives easier, but their combination creates new difficulties that we did not have previously. And, when your company grows, it's difficult to ask everybody to use the same tools because they all require subtle details that help these teams. One solution is to develop a tool that is as adaptable as possible for each team, such as Monday. I'm a tremendous fan, but even Monday was lacking in the minor touches that these teams require. The other option is to build an abstraction layer on top of all of these technologies and establish a hub for everyone. The second route is preferred by today's product.

Today, glean is our product.

You've probably heard of Ben Thompson's famous Aggregation Theory. With this hypothesis, he explains the success of large corporations. He divides the value chain into three parts: suppliers, distributors, and consumers/users. Because digital distribution is essentially free, aggregators usually win. When viewed in this light, it is simple to appreciate glean's potential. They combined the majority of the SaaS technologies we use into a single platform. It functions as a search engine for all of them. And it personalizes the results; for example, if you are a software engineer, you will get Atlassian or Github results first, followed by the applicable tools. You can also build a shortcut for many content sources under a single topic by curating them. Consider the documents that must be read during the onboarding process. Glean is a natural transitional word after that.

There are so many features that it would take chapters to go over them all. Glean was developed by engineers from Google Search and Facebook, and it is supported by notable investors such as Lightspeed and Sequoia. As a result, it is safe to anticipate that they will have a bright future. Nobody complains out loud about the documentation chaos. We accepted our situation as learned helplessness. Someone looked closely at our life, identified the problem, and brilliantly solved it. I hope you have a chance to try it out!

We’ll talk again tomorrow.

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