The document has been used to record and preserve information for a long time, and it’s still a primary tool of work in today’s startup world. It’s where a lot of creativity and information sharing happens. However, the document is not necessarily the most effective in its current iteration.
Startups, particularly distributed and hybrid ones, suffer communication gaps, lost information, and document organizing problems daily. In the U.S. alone, 54% of office professionals struggle to keep their documents organized.
The old document and the traditional way of organizing it need to change. Entrepreneurs and businesses need a new kind of document that’s more intuitive and adaptable to their dynamic needs. This is where Typed comes in.
Introducing Typed
Typed is more than a document editor. It’s a knowledge management and document editing tool that organizes information for entire teams.
Our founders realized how limited they were by the traditional way of storing and organizing documents. While the mainstream, cloud-based document editing and storage platforms worked, there was so much they couldn’t do. From assigning tasks to scheduling timelines or connecting documents to each other contextually, so many tasks had to be taken care of outside the document. Capturing, storing, organizing, and sharing information required using many tools, which, in turn, impacted productivity and efficiency.
It’s against this background that Typed was born — a product that allows both individuals and teams to bring together various document editing, collaboration, and organization functionalities in one place. We use network-driven technology instead of the traditional document storage and access system that most cloud-based document storage platforms (think Google Drive and Dropbox) use.
Best of all, Typed sits on top of Google Docs so you’re not in completely new territory. You get lots of additional helpful features on a platform you recognize and have worked with before. What’s the idea behind working like this? Here’s our why.
Why we are who we are
We want to move away from the document being a tool for recording the output to it being something that records the entire process. This is particularly important given how much data and information are growing faster than ever before.
Our mission is to make work easy, efficient, and effective. We want people to focus on what matters while we take care of the rest. Our vision is to get to a place where information loss is a thing of the past. We want to get rid of systematic limitations that hold people back from doing their best work.
To put this more simply, let’s think of Iron Man 2 for a minute, specifically the part where Tony Stark is making a new element. In this scene, Tony Stark has a map of everything he needs and he’s throwing ideas out there while Jarvis takes care of the rest. Our endgame is similar; we want to allow people to engage with work, the way Tony Stark engages with science — with everything they need to accomplish their work in one place.
We want to:
- Revolutionize the document as we know it. We want Typed to serve as the foundational tool for teams to get their work done. This will include everything from making information accessible, to maximizing efficiency and enabling seamless collaboration across organizations.
- Change the way we work. Information silos and fragmented workflows are plaguing the modern workplace. Our aim is to eliminate these and create a living network of knowledge that essentially connects each team into a single brain.
- Use technology to harness human potential. The current antiquated way of working wastes a lot of time. We want to free up people’s time so that they can focus on what needs to be done rather than on things that can be done for them.
How Typed supercharges knowledge management systems
Knowledge is key to making the right business decisions. As such, knowledge management is crucial for every business.
Typed allows users to take the traditional document several notches above its original capabilities, upgrading knowledge management and team collaboration experiences to a new level.
Sophisticated referencing and document organization capabilities
With standard document editors, there are little to no features to reference other documents. There’s also no scope to create a database of resources you can use to contextualize the current document — a lot of information is lost in translation because of this lack of context.
Typed allows you to reference and add backlinks to other Google documents. You can add multiple file formats into a single document. For even more context, you can link documents across folders and projects, in a way that represents how they are connected to each other.
Still on referencing, Typed comes with built-in simultaneous viewing. This reduces the frequency of switching tabs and applications, thereby lowering the chances of going out of context as you work.
Visualizing document connections
Both the traditional folder system (Folder >> Subfolder >> File) and the generic rules for saving files (for example, by date or file title) served us well in the past. However, they can get clunky and hard to maintain, essentially creating siloed knowledge systems, which are bad news for any organization.
Network mode ditches the conventional way of organizing documents, giving the entire team a visual representation of how documents are connected.
Using this feature, organizations can erase the hierarchical approach to folders. Instead, people can see how everything is connected in real time. For example, they can see how complex a project is getting, including how a parent document relates to other documents.
Everyone on the team, no matter their level of experience, can see the entire context of each document, where they are in the document ecosystem, and what access they need.
Narrowing your focus when working
We have several handy features to help you focus when working. Recommendations simplify the search for related documents based on context. On top of that, the Highlights and Read Only Mode features allow you to filter out irrelevant content, enabling you to focus on what’s important at that particular moment.
Assigning tasks and setting deadlines
With Typed, the entire team can go beyond document creation. To maximize efficiency, you can assign tasks and set deadlines on Google Calendar while in Typed. No more manual deadline setting, plus the assigned documents can be prioritized in terms of importance and characteristics.
As we work to add new features to this toolkit and improve user experience, our work will be underpinned by some guidelines and values we consider sacred.
Typed values
The following is a summary of the values that will guide us into the future.
Team productivity
There are lots of productivity tools for the individual, but not nearly enough for teams. Unfortunately, the existing pool of individual-focused tools tends to contradict teams’ needs. Our aim is to allow teams to work together productively. This means we’ll empower individuals to increase their productivity while simultaneously allowing entire teams to do the same.
To date, we’ve created several features that eliminate the inefficiencies born out of the process of searching for information. For instance, individuals can up their productivity with the split-screen and recommendations features. On a team level, people can increase their efficiency using the task allocation, referencing and backlinks, and network mode features of Typed.
Context-driven work
In a startup environment, most employees don’t work on a project from start to finish. As such, it’s not enough for each person to get work done. It’s equally important for them to convey the context of that work to the person/people taking it forward.
Each employee should have an understanding of the background of a piece of work, as well as how it fits in the bigger picture. We want to make this context flow through entire companies seamless, making the process of finding and working with information — even information you never knew existed — easy and complete.
A united knowledge system
Typed wants to break down barriers to knowledge sharing and management that arise out of different people knowing different things. Our vision for the future includes bringing different individuals together to form a single brain that allows each person to do their best work efficiently.
In other words, the future won’t be one where individuals are trying their best to be a team, but one where each individual forms part of a giant, united, and transparent knowledge system. Anyone will be able to share information anytime and anywhere.
Redefining the document to create better workplaces
We’re surrounded by so much data and information daily, and keeping up with it all is vital for business success. The traditional document is no longer enough for this. Today’s startups need ambitious and revolutionary knowledge management systems
Typed brings together scattered information into a knowledge network that allows teams to collaborate more easily. Not only that, but the fact that it integrates with Google Docs means that your entire team can easily improve their document and knowledge management capabilities.
We’re looking to change the way people work digitally by creating the next-gen document that empowers people. Want to join us on this journey.
Sign up for free today and join us on our mission for a more productive future!
