Tettra: An Internal Wiki Built for Slack Teams

Andy Cook
May 25, 2016
crabs trading money

Announcing our beta and funding

We started Tettra almost eight months ago, and it’s been a wild ride with lots of changes so far. The one steady constant along the way though has been our goal to help teams share their internal knowledge in an easy way.

Millennials make up the largest portion of the workforce today, most of whom are used to having instant access to any piece of information via a quick Google search. At most companies though, accessing information at work is much harder. Information as simple as the list of company holidays to more important topics like an explanation of the new company strategy from the management team.

We believe the best way to empower your employees is to operate transparently. Communication channels and access to information should be open to everyone in your company equally, all the way from the CEO to the newest intern.

We experienced just how powerful a transparent culture can be first hand at HubSpot and we want to bring that type of culture to more teams everywhere.

One of the things we learned in the last few months working on Tettra is that Slack does wonders for enabling transparent communication. No matter your title, you can get in touch with anyone on your team quickly by sending a message. Slack’s a real-time messaging app though and you shouldn’t have to bother a teammate who’s offline or heads down working to get a piece of information from them. An internal wiki works much better in that situation.

We want Tettra to be easy to use and easy to access, so we connected it to the Slack API. Since teams are spending most of their day communicating in Slack, we found it makes sense to connect their internal wiki to Slack too.

Today we’re announcing two pieces of news that will allow us to help more teams share internal knowledge even faster:

  1. We’re launching our beta and opening it to the public
  2. We closed a funding round, led by Mike Volpe

Tettra’s open for invites

If you’re using Slack and looking for an internal wiki, you can sign up for access to Tettra on our site.

Here are some of the highlights of the product:

A powerful and simple to use editor that supports inline images, tables, markdown and more

A slash command that searches the wiki right from Slack

Categories to organize your content and a dashboard to quickly keep up with what’s going on at your company

There’s a lot more great features coming down the pipeline too, and right now’s a great time to sign up for the product since you’ll be able to influence the road map by giving us feedback. You can also get the introductory price point for the current product too.

If you’re using Slack and want to setup an internal wiki, you can request early access to Tettra on our site.

We closed a funding round

We came up with the idea for Tettra when our team for Leadin grew from two people to six overnight and we realized we needed to write down all the knowledge in heads in one centralized place for our new teammates.

When we started looking for a simple, easy-to-use internal wiki for our team to share updates and documentation, we came up empty. The only tools we could really find were clunky, open-source wikis that we had to host ourselves or expensive cloud-based solutions that had lots of features we didn’t actually want. That’s when we said to ourselves, “Why hasn’t anyone built a simple team wiki yet?” About 9 months after coming up with the idea, Nelson Joyce and I decided to move on from Leadin and take the plunge to start a company together.

During our time working at HubSpot we got to know most of the executives there. I’ve never met a group of people more willing to help and supportive of new ideas. When we left, they all wished us well and offered to help in the future. We’re thrilled to say that they’ve not only been helpful, but we can now count the majority of that group as investors in Tettra as well.

Mike Volpe led a syndicate on AngelList for us with David Cancel coming in at the same time to start us off. Mike was also able to bring in the BOSS syndicate run by TJ Mahoney from Accomplice, which was a huge help in closing the round. Mike and David are exactly what you’d want in angel investors. Both of them believe in our team and have experienced the problem we’re trying to solve first hand at HubSpot. We’re super pumped to have them in our corner, and you can read more from Mike on why he invested in Tettra on his blog.

But wait — there’s more. Lots of other HubSpotters invested in us too, including Dharmesh Shah, Brian Halligan, JD Sherman, Jim O’Neill, Mark Roberge, Elias Torres, Jessica Meher, Mike Champion, and Andrei Oprisan. In fact, 52% of our round came through Mike’s syndicate and HubSpotters, and another 27% of our round came through original HubSpot angel investors like Brian Shin and Ed Roberts. We’re very fortunate to have worked at HubSpot and our hope is that we can follow in their footsteps by building one of Boston’s next pillar companies over time with Tettra.

One more interesting stat that we’re also really proud of is that beyond HubSpot angels, 95% of the money we raised came through local, Boston-area investors including Paul English, Kyle York, Diane Hessan, Ryan Burke, Matt Engel and Jere Doyle.

The pay-it-forward culture that exists in Boston Tech, where companies are willing to test new products and previously successful entrepreneurs help the next crop of founders is amazing. We ended up raising $914k, almost twice as much as we originally set out to raise, due in large part to the great ecosystem we have here in Boston. Thanks to everyone who invested in us and all our early customers for trying out Tettra. Let’s build something great together.

Use Slack and want an internal wiki? Try out Tettra.

Also thanks to Laurent Drion, Myisha Frazier, Timothy Hosek, Ken Morimoto and Mark Pui for coming into the round too from outside of Boston.

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