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How Y Combinator-backed Heptabase is carving a niche in the crowded note-taking software market
This promising young startup already has paying users from across 61 countries and counts project managers, researchers, and software engineers as their target audiences. Last month we got a chance to meet with the three co-founders of Heptabase, Alan Chan, Ethan Wu, and Yeefun Lin, to learn more about their startup story.
With a plethora of productivity tools on the market, all promising you the same thing that they can help organize your life to make every day more efficient, it can get quite overwhelming weighing up all the options to try and understand the differences between one product to another.
But for Heptabase, a new startup based in Taiwan who has recently launched a visual note-taking tool isn’t shying away from the crowded market and believes its unique workflow can enable them to differentiate themselves from the competition.
Founded in 2021, Heptabase recently closed a $1.7 million seed round from HOF Capital, Y Combinator, Kleiner Perkins, Moving Capital, Taiwan’s Tonic Fund, and other investors, including the founders of Socialcam, Triplebyte and Codementor.
This promising young startup already has paying users from across 61 countries and counts project managers, researchers, and software engineers as their target audiences. Last month we got a chance to meet with the three co-founders of Heptabase, Alan Chan, Ethan Wu, and Yeefun Lin, to learn more about their startup story.
Heptabase’s value proposition lies in its distinctive workflow
With many established players such as Evernote and Notion, how can Heptabase stand out? Alan says it all comes down to the difference in workflows.
“There are hundreds of note-taking apps on the market but really there are only three or four workflows to them. Evernote is like a digital notebook — so everything is categorized from commercial to marketing and other different topics; Heptabase is categorized based on the different stages of your thinking process — thinking, capturing or creating.” Alan says these are two distinctive workflows designed to solve different processes in a different way.
“As we continue to iterate and add new features to Heptabase, we will always focus on our core purpose which is to help users to efficiently capture ideas, build on those ideas, and then share it with others. So it’s never about the features we launch,” says Alan. “For example, if customers suggest they want a PDF form feature, apps like Evernote won't change their workflow just because they added a new PDF feature. We’re not about developing new features — we want to focus on the workflow.”
With a small team of only four people at the moment, Ethan says it’s important for them to effectively manage the team’s workload by staying focused on their core purpose. “We find that many people who use note-taking tools tend to suggest new features to be added just because they’ve already seen it in other tools. So it’s important for us to study and analyze all the user feedback we get to pinpoint what exactly they are asking for — what is the root of the problem and how can we help them solve it?”
Founded through a constant pursuit for effective study techniques
Alan and Ethan first met in high school. Back then they already knew they wanted to do a startup but didn’t have any ideas yet. So they formed a group with their friends in school where they would self-study on extracurricular things such as web technology and product development, and each member would share what they’ve learned with the group.
Alan previously studied at Minerva University and at National Taiwan University but voluntarily dropped out from both of them to pursue better ways of learning. He self-taught himself many things through years of self-study on a range of topics from global market trends to history, and one of the pain points he came across during that time was: “How do I manage, store and communicate the large amount of information and ideas I’ve accumulated? Some of my ideas came from other ideas but how do I trace back and remember what inspired me to think of it?” He didn’t know it at the time but these questions were how it led him to the idea of Heptabase.
His struggle in capturing and sharing ideas resonated with both Ethan and Yeefun who both experienced their own similar struggles while in university. “I used to take down a lot of notes on paper when I was studying but you would easily forget what you’ve heard and learned as it was hard to manage and store paperwork,” says Ethan. “It seems like a waste of time and energy to me if there’s no way of collecting and managing the things we’ve learned in our past in a useful way.”
While brainstorming startup ideas, Alan came across an article by Y Combinator that provided advice for startups, and he remembered one of the key points in the article was: “You can’t do a startup for the sake of doing a startup — you need to have a clear mission and genuine passion to solve a problem or else it won’t be sustainable.” So although many startup ideas had crossed his mind, the one problem that he felt he really resonated with was: “How do I help myself and others learn better, think deeper, and make sense of the massive information in our complex world?”
The vision behind this note-taking tool
From the first glance, Heptabase seems to be just another note-taking tool amongst the hundreds of other apps that help you with productivity but Alan says there’s more to it than just that.
Drawing from computer pioneers and thinkers in the 1960s, Alan says Heptabase wants to use computers as a medium to support how humans create and share collective intelligence.
Alan’s vision of Heptabase is to help knowledge workers integrate their knowledge lifecycle of ‘Exploring → Collecting → Thinking → Creating → Sharing’. He wants to build an ecosystem of tools that optimize information interoperability, context retrieval, and collective knowledge creation, with the end goal of evolving contextualized knowledge internet.
“When we look at Facebook, Reddit, and many other social platforms, the way they connect communication and the input/output of the information are all different because everyone's intention of using different platforms is different. So even though what you see of our product right now is a note-taking tool, the two core problems we want to solve are: Memory and Communication.
Currently, our platform is solving the memory problem and we are continuously working on our information lifecycle workflow to solve the second problem of how to share and communicate our ideas once we’ve captured them.
Actionable insights from customer feedback helped its Y Combinator application stand out
Since 2005, Y Combinator, a startup fund and program, has invested in nearly 3,000 companies including Airbnb, DoorDash, Stripe, Instacart, Dropbox, and Coinbase. Heptabase is part of the W22 batch but Alan says they didn’t think they would get accepted when they applied.
But one thing he reckoned they did right was the fact they spent a lot of time getting user feedback. “We created a simple prototype for users in one week and started collecting feedback to steer our product iterations,” he recalls. “Y Combinator likes startups who move fast and break things because they want you to optimize your product with the customer feedback you get.”
Another key strength he mentioned that probably helped their application to stand out was the speed of their product development. “After we launched the prototype we worked fast to improve our product based on the feedback we’ve received — we had a new iteration almost every day,” he says, adding that their product market fit was shaped through hundreds of one-on-one meetings and walkthrough tutorials they conducted with their users.
“So our application was a very data-driven one because I had hard figures of customer retention rates to share during the interview and the product strategies we have for Heptabase are all based on user feedback. Y Combinator likes startups that build products and then talk to users — and that’s what we did.”
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