Ankit Pansari
August 24, 2021
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4 min read
SaaS has dramatically shifted our work from files in our devices to links in our browsers.
Everywhere we work— Google Docs, Jira tickets, Miro Boards, Figma links, or even the daily standup call on Zoom—is a URL on the web.
With how the pandemic cornered us into embracing remote work, it’s certain that SaaS applications are the present and the future. Most of them have collaboration built in natively as a first party that allows people to work together at the same time. Think Notion, Figma, Airtable, etc.
That said, we are yet to see the same level of collaboration and organization on our browser as we have seen within each application.
On average, we switch between 25 to 30 web pages a day; most days it’s more.
And scrambling for links has become ubiquitous to how we work today. Workflows within each application are moving towards helping everyone come together. However, there is a need for a common layer across applications that acts as a well-collaborative functionality across them.
So we are starting with one of the most essential elements of sharing in the modern century—URLs.
Unlike files, it’s hard to find, structure, organize, or simply name URLs. That should not be the case.
Here are a few anecdotes that made us realize the need for a solution
We collectively came together cause we never wanted to answer: where the heck is that link now?
Personally, this frustration got amplified in my previous company when I had to wait for half a day for someone to share a file. Or when I had to send a link for testing to the developer at 2 am while on vacation.
While looking for a solution, I chanced upon the knowledge that Google, Linkedin, Twitter, Uber, Stripe have a culture of internally naming their links.
We decided to step up and solve the problem better with OSlash. By democratizing this tech, we want to provide the solution to organizations of all sizes.
Our vision is to help you organize all your information (that lives in links) and make it accessible and useful company-wide. We want to remove any friction in knowledge sharing so that teams can document, collaborate, and contribute, all at once.
We help you take long, impossible-to-recall links built for the browsers and slash them into the exact opposite - short, intuitive shortcuts for humans.
So your Zoom call can be opened company-wide by typing o/allhands or your company health coverage document can be accessed by going to o/insurance. You can just as easily share these links in conversations.
You think of where you want to get to on the browser, and we’ll make sure you’re there. In less than a second. Once OSlash becomes the default way of working for a company, you can open a link simply by wanting to do so with an inbuilt search function.
To give life to the vision, our whole team has been working hard. We’ve been dogfooding our product and in just so many months, we don’t think we can do without it. This is the same feedback we have received from our earliest users who are some of the best companies around the world that has made our resolve stronger.
We’ve created the fastest workplace browser experience, OSlash autocomplete to reference any link in a text editor without copy-pasting a URL, and variable shortcuts to access say any JIRA ticket directly by typing o/jira/100.
And I am sure this is just the start.
No one should feel like they are in the dark. OSlash takes away all the clutter, ambiguity, absence of structure, and ignorance, by bringing information right where you need it—at your fingertips.
To try out OSlash with your team, you can click here to download the extension.
Or if you just want to chat, give feedback, or learn more, send me an email at ankit@oslash.com.