[richiebonilla]

Hey HN! We're Richie and Eni, the founders of Clarity (https://clarity.so/).

Clarity is a SaaS product for distributed teams to track tasks, plan projects, and build long-term knowledge in one place. Instead of consulting multiple tools or maintaining a bespoke system, teams have a single weekly doc that pulls together their projects, tasks, and notes.

In order to function well, teams must maintain a shared mental model of their work. This is especially difficult for distributed teams because we don't have a physical space to reinforce context. To solve this, the Weekly is your team's front page throughout the week.

We've both been working remotely since 2014 and we met on a mutual client project in 2018. Clarity started as a side project to help us run our client work. Our clients were happy, but we were running it all manually behind the scenes. Last year we dropped everything to turn that system into a self-serve SaaS product.

What's unique about our approach is the combination of real-time collaboration, a knowledge graph, and a formal project management feature set. With a knowledge graph, teams can capture & retrieve information quickly without the friction & fragility of folder organization. Clarity's project management functionality can leverage the graph to centralize tasks and surface what's important to your work. This creates a high-context workspace without the maintenance overhead.

Distributed work is only becoming more popular. We believe the next decade of the Internet will be more collaborative than the last. As a result, we'll need tools built specifically for collaborative Internet squads to assemble around a project or a cause. We're building the spaces on the Internet where that happens.

Check out our demo video: https://youtu.be/PDKgvD5BEgE.

[pkiv]

This is cool. I like the idea of using something separate than Notion, because Notion tends to get too distracting.

Have you considered adding some operating templates for startups? I imagine your user is signing up because they need new process, and giving them some inspiration to play with may accelerate onboarding. (I signed up hoping to get that template you used in your demo video)

I'm not a fan of the superhuman interface, I've found that it create a big learning curve for what is could be a simple interface. At the same time I'm glad you guys drew inspiration from Linear, they have some great design too. I feel like they balance the hotkeys + clickable elements really well.

Slack integration is great. I think Loom would be big in my workflow too.

Happy to do a user interview etc to help out. email is in my profile.

[richiebonilla]

Totally agree with you about templates.

Definitely see what you're saying about the Superhuman-like interface. We're still iterating there. We need to enable pro-level usage without hindering accessibility to casual users. We're continuing to simplify simplify simplify :)

We are currently testing an integration using the Loom SDK.

Will definitely take you up on the user interview. Thanks!

[version_five]

I'm interested in this. I'm curious if you have any comments or thoughts on how a team would react it I just show up one day and say "hey guys, we're going to start using Clarity now". It may sound silly but I don't want to SaaS startup fatigue my team and as we are already trying another product (in an unrelated space) I'm curious about best practices for getting a team on board.

Also curious about pricing, and if you have any ancillary business model I should know about, like selling or otherwise using data or some other derived metrics based on user's activity.

[richiebonilla]

Not silly at all, it's an important consideration. The following is based on what we've seen work well.

The first place I'd start is by outlining your team's week in the Weekly. I'd finish any ongoing projects in their current tools and link to those other tools from the Weekly. This way those projects aren't disrupted, but you've now gained a central hub for your team.

As you start new projects, you can create a project doc in Clarity for each of them. Eventually the existing projects will be finished, or you can migrate what's left.

Next, I would start to conduct meeting notes in Clarity because any action items that come out of those meetings can be delegated and managed alongside your projects and their tasks.

Finally, you can start posting articles, ideas, research, and customer feedback in the shared notes feed in Clarity (rather than posting them in Slack/chat). This way chat is less distracting, and you can resurface those notes later by using tags. The notes feed gives everyone a chronological feed of notes shared by the team, without the distraction of chat.

Rather than conducting a huge migration from your current tools to Clarity, I find it's less overwhelming if you bring information over as it's relevant to your work. Not only is this less up front work, it also starts your knowledge graph off with a useful foundation.

Happy to elaborate further and answer any scenario-specific questions.

As for pricing, we are rolling that out this week. All Clarity bases are free to use for an unlimited period of time and with unlimited members. Each base has 1,000 free blocks per month [1], and can have up to 100 active tasks [2].

When you exceed either of these usage limits, you'll have the option to upgrade your base to a Pro subscription that is billed per member per month.

This is our only business model. We do not sell your data or any metrics derived from user activity. Privacy is our top priority.

[1] - A block is a unit of content (e.g. a paragraph of text, an image, a video embed, a checklist item). All documents in Clarity are composed of blocks. The 1,000 block limit resets at the start of each calendar month.

[2] - Tasks created, but not marked done, are considered active.

[dmode]

Just checked out the demo video. Feel like I can accomplish most of these by just using Google docs. Is there enough of a difference to take the the leap from using a free docs software to a SaaS product

[richiebonilla]

Funny enough, our early prototypes were done using Google Docs. There are features in Clarity that were impossible to simulate there, which is what drove us to build custom software in the first place.

The two most obvious are: 1) declaring tasks across documents and visualizing them in a single task database to create filtered views of work 2) interconnecting docs by topics and keywords so that you can navigate your knowledge base more effectively

There's also a shared notes feed for async information sharing, nested projects, in-app notifications, and other features that fill in the whole picture. The outline block structure also makes your information queryable beyond basic string search, which enables new types of exploration through your knowledge base, notes, and conversations.

I also wouldn't underestimate the power of a default home screen. There's a lot of power in having an enforced front page vs a doc the team must remember to check.

It's a cohesive set of functionality built to support teamwork vs a generic collection of documents.

[hizxy]

I watched the demo but I still don’t understand how this is different than Notion or Jira. So the benefit is all my tasks are in one place? I guess that’s nice?

[sergiotapia]

Heads up: your site is broken on Brave with shields up. Your frontend code probably depends on some tracking stuff that isn't being loaded with adblockers.

[richiebonilla]

Thanks for the heads up. Our app only uses Intercom and Mixpanel. Are there any best practices for how to handle this so that Brave users can use the app and keep their privacy preferences intact?

[strooltz]

Came here to say the same thing. :/

[Invictus0]

Why would I use this instead of just creating a page in Notion? I get that it's supposed to be some combo of Notion/Jira/Trello but I don't really see the need for it. My manager uses OneNote to guide meeting agendas and it works great.

[richiebonilla]

Great question. If you're looking at a single weekly doc, then you could write it anywhere. However, if you're working across multiple weeks, and you have a few projects in various stages of development, then Clarity saves you a lot of time & effort. Widgets summarize the work happening across your base, and backlinks help you look back across Weeklys, projects, notes, and conversations to resurface information according to keywords.

The issue with tools like Notion is that you need to do everything manually. The more powerful your system, the more work you have to do. This leads to what the Notion community refers to as “breakdowns”—where a workspace is overwhelming and must be redesigned & refactored to be useful again.

[svcrunch]

Hi Richie. I watched your demo video. Good luck with Clarity!

I noticed you have a search feature, and I'm guessing it's keyword based (Algolia/Elasticsearch)? If you searched for "team is overworked", could it return the retrospective that states "This lead our teammates to feel spread thin" (from the demo video)?

I'm asking because semantic search can solve this problem. I have a research background in this area, and I cofounded ZIR AI (https://zir-ai.com/) to provide an easy-to-integrate semantic search.

So, if better search is a priority, let's connect :-) I would love to collaborate.

[richiebonilla]

Sweet, we should connect. My email is in my bio. Feel free to ping.

[officialchicken]

Congrats!!! At second glance I really appreciate the not-notion-ness (which I've tried and failed to use for this particular use case, along with JIRA/"conflusion" and other tools).

I know there's a ton of potential features to develop in the pipeline, and I'm assuming you're using the this internally (e.g. dogfood development) Is there a "roadmap" that can be publicly shared as an example of a real living document?

[edotrajan]

I just started using Clarity after seeing the demo yesterday. I like the vision and how fast it is

This is easy to convert notes to tasks (helps if you have an existing systems of projects , tasks )

I know you can do this in notion by assigning tags to rows/ records and filter by tags.

Still I like how clarity does it for me instead of me doing it

[jacob_rezi]

First thought before sign up - cool, seems easy. I'll try.

Second thought post sign up - this is notion :(

[richiebonilla]

Third thought's the charm!

Have a look at our demo video, those workflows are not possible in Notion :)

[MPiccinato]

This is awesome! Was wondering if y'all rolled your own editor or built off of an open source project?

[realrocker]

I do similar weekly updates using notion.so templates. New pages are created manually every week. Am I your target customer ?

[richiebonilla]

Sure sounds like it. Are you doing this for a team or yourself? You can use Clarity in either case, but I’m curious.

[realrocker]

With my team. Everyone in my org. does it. Multiple teams

[navd]

This is interesting. Any way to post the documents to be read publicly?

[richiebonilla]

Yep, you can make any document public & readonly. We plan to add more options for public pages too.