They’re a talented team of two from Finland that got Y Combinator’s stamp of approval and built a promising product for storing and sharing content from across the web.
But consumer-facing browser extensions can prove difficult for growing a large user base, so this startup, Kippt, did a little pivot.
After launching more than a year ago, they refocused on the enterprise market with a new version of their product called Inc.
While Kippt’s earlier product was like a latter-day version of the social bookmarking service Delicious, their new product Inc is more competitive with Yammer or Convo.
They found that many startups were using their consumer-facing product Kippt for sharing links. Co-founder Karri Saarinen says creating a separate brand would make the product easier to market.
“There were quite many companies or teams using it for sharing, organizing and discussing content,” Saarinen said.
So they created an entirely new version of Kippt. It has a few key differences with the original consumer-face Kippt. For one, users are always collecting content to share with a group instead of keeping personal and private records of things they find across the web.
Inc also lets companies have multiple teams internally for different streams of content. Teams of designers can share aesthetic content while engineers can share other kinds of links.
“Creative agencies want to follow ideas in the industry. They want to know about good concepts and designs,” Saarinen said, pointing to one client, teehan+lax, a design agency that has worked with Medium and Readability. Two other clients include BetterDoctor and Bugsnag.
Now they’re taking the product out of beta and opening enrollment to everyone. At this point, enough companies are using Inc that the company is financially self-sustaining, Saarinen said.
He says there are “thousands” of companies that have tried it in the last few months.
They’ve introduced a four-tiered system for paid users. If you have less than 10 users, it’s free. But if you have over 10, then it’s $19 a month. For up to 25 people, it’s $49 a month, then it’s $99 for up to 50 people. After that, it’s $200 a month for up to 100 users. Then there are enterprise plans that are negotiated on a case-by-case basis.
The company has also done a number of feature updates over the last few months including posting by e-mail, previewing links and auto-completing emojis and @usernames.
While there are products out there like Convo, Yammer and Evernote for Business, Saarinen said he views e-mail as the main competition.
“Mailing lists are still quite popular,” he said. “But these kinds of discussions are not best supported by long chains of e-mail.”
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