2024 Recap, & The Quiet Art of Building Better Things

Last year, my life was about to change, and I didn't even have the Notion of it. (Yes, that pun was absolutely intended.)

There I was, living the freelance life, juggling marketing consultations and drowning in documents. Notion was my digital filing cabinet. Then one day, while doom-scrolling through Notion alternatives (as one does when procrastinating), I stumbled upon Slite.

They called themselves an 'AI-powered Knowledge Base,' but all I could think was 'Damn, that's beautiful.'

What happened next was a bit of a whirlwind:

• Signed up to Slite (obviously)
• Stalked their CEO on LinkedIn (sorry not sorry, Chris)
• Nailed a few surprisingly warm interviews
• And boom – joined the team full-time in December

Now, exactly one year later, I've watched Slite transform from just another doc tool to something extraordinary. But here's the plot twist:

While Slite was busy becoming the simplest knowledge base ever, we were cooking up something even wilder, bigger, and better behind the scenes.

Before I spill all the tea about our secret project, here's some of the most impactful things we shipped in 2024 – dedicated to you folks, our amazing customers, who've shown us nothing but love 🫶

First things first, everything we did for Slite (the product)

Slite had good editing, knowledge management, and all the needed integrations. We were almost closing the Knowledge Management Gap.

And we’d shipped quite a lot of those features over 2023, and fast. In fact, we were the first ones to ship AI search as a Knowledge Base.

So 2024 was the year of fixing the small cracks, the invisible issues, and put finishing touches to Slite’s existing features.

We really improved performance

Teams using Slite were growing in size every year. And we needed to ensure Slite wouldn’t feel slow for any of them. So we radically improved 2 things

1. The editor

The Slite blank page is the core of the product, so it made sense to begin there. We wanted the Slite editor to feel snappy even if you’re writing 5,000+ word whitepaper, with 20 sketches, and dozens of other embeds. Today, it’s all there.

As the Slite-resident-writer, no one tested this - or is enjoying the snappiness - more than me.

Oh and as a bonus - Cyn, our Product Designer, worked on adding more highlighting and font colours. You might’ve seen it already but look how much better Slite docs look now!

2. The collections

Databases and collections are at the heart of most sub-team channels. Like the editor, we wanted our collections to be heavy-duty as well. Being fast, capable, and navigational even with 100+ subdocs. This took some serious work from our dev team. But it’s finally in place.

To get to this stage, our dev team even implemented a zero-bug policy for a few months and decided to clear our Linear backlog. They worked around the clock - just to ensure your collaboration moves like clockwork. Now, on average, bugs get resolved in 1.5 days. Huuuge win for us on speed.

We made comments better

Next bit was collaboration.

We added a comment sidebar for all those long docs with too many “quick question…” and “don’t you think this should be…”

As a writer with an affinity for typos, I usually ping Elisa to drop her notes on my drafts. I don’t know about you but my draft rework time has radically improved - since I can see all open comments in one place, click, edit, reply, and resolve. All without pulling my hair.

We added 1-click doc formatting

Slite already had an AI-powered generator when I joined. We took it a step further by asking a ridiculous question - “What if I could turn my rough notes into perfectly formatted documentation - in one click?”

The team came through. We now have a one-click quick improve to do exactly that.

You can take it for a spin using our Magic Doc Formatter.

We built a few-clicks Wiki Generator

Following suit, we asked another ridiculous question,
“What if you could generate a Slite wiki - with dedicated team channels, templates, etc. - just by chatting with AI?”

And like the quick improve feature, the team came through again and built the Wiki Generator - a free tool to build the wiki you want, just by typing, and importing it to your Slite workspace.

You can play with it here.

Second, Chris made a bet.

In late 2022, during the Christmas time-off, 2 folks were still online on Slack - Chris and Florian. Since chatGPT launched in December '22's first week, they’d been tinkering with it and spitballed an idea of building a similar, natural-language search function for Slite.

This brainstorm became Ask - our AI search.

The idea was simple - knowledge workers hunt through docs to reconstruct context. Give them the capability to just ask a simple question - and get a simple answer (with cited sources, of course.)

After the feature became a hit in 2023, Chris - again - found himself free in late December, and wanted to take it up a few 100 notches.

He started a Slite doc, wrote down a few words, put down a few Excalidraw sketches, and named it AskX - right then.

This was the first AskX vision - put down in Slite:

Chris was so confident that he bet that it could truly be a breakthrough product. And wanted to build it himself with a small squad as an experiment. We let him make the bet, assuring that the rest of us would do the heavy lifting on Slite, while he could go full founder mode.

By April, we saw the first AskX experience:

We onboarded some external companies who were gracious enough to try and keep giving feedback on AskX. So we kept improving, kept making sources better, get RAG to work properly on the back-end, add filters to the search experience, and did about a 100 other things.

9 months into building AskX, we realised that it could do so much more.

It was getting good at answering contextual answers, yes.

Could it go and help every knowledge worker - even more?

Could AskX do all the boring, tedious tasks of a knowledge worker?

Like filling out RFPs?

Or quickly assembling a table of customer testimonials?

Or letting writers like me get context on specs while writing an article?

Or create an email digest of all the big weekly internal updates from your Slack conversation?

As of December 2024, me writing this, the answer to all the questions above is a resounding yes.

And the consensus comes from all the AskX pilot users who are legit using AskX for all the above.

In fact, it inspired us to write a piece on Seven surprising ways teams actually use AskX.

Safe to say, the bet turned into one of our biggest wins of 2024.
If you want to ping him for an AskX demo, block some time here.

So, what's in store for 2025?

Here's the features landing in AskX in Q1:

• Smart FAQ suggestions for each space
• Custom digest functionality
• Pre-set suggested queries per source
• Templates of spaces and instructions

As for Slite itself - we're doubling down on what matters most: making your daily doc life even smoother.

Remember how I mentioned we spent 2024 fixing the small cracks? Well, 2025 is about taking that foundation and building something even better.

For Slite, we're working on advanced features for power users to help with multi-doc workflows. For AskX, we're working on adding more sources (some of the most popular B2B apps), improving UX, answer quality, and customer generation capabilities so AskX can do all the knowledge repackaging work, usually undertaken by an IC in the middle of their focus hours.

Between AskX's evolution and Slite's refinements, 2025 is shaping up to be our most exciting year yet for you folks.

For me? it's looking I'll have a lot to write about. Wish me luck.

For now, I'll stop it here.

Thank you so much for following our journey.

I hope you have a festive time-off with your loved ones 🫶