Launch HN: Slapdash (YC W19) – A uniform, low-latency interface for cloud apps

[kanevski]

Hello HN,

I'm Ivan, one of the founders of Slapdash (https://slapdash.com/). Slapdash lets you work across all of your cloud apps at desktop speed, sort of like an OS for cloud apps.

We have built a uniform, low-latency data browser (kind of like Finder) as well as a unified command line-like interface (kind of like Spotlight) for the applications you use at work.

When we left our big company jobs, one of the difficult things to part with was the tooling. Companies like Facebook and Stripe build a class of tools internally that unifies all the employees and any collaboration apps, so you can find anyone or anything the company knows. Everything is just a quick search away [0]. It’s quite a useful way to work. Common questions in day-to-day work are easy to answer. What’s the history of this code abstraction? What are my colleagues working on? What’s the story with this customer?

Building such a system today means connecting people's cloud apps, because that's where most of the work is happening today. Even for a small team like us, our work spans Drive, Dropbox, Figma, GitHub, Asana, Notion, Docusign, Slack, Quip, etc.

The first thing we built was a low-latency file system for cloud apps. You connect an application like Drive, or GitHub to Slapdash and we give you a way to search and browse the data in a uniform interface (kind of like Finder). It turns your working world into a database you can easily query.

We modeled our file system as a graph and we built our architecture to match, with a focus on performance. We built an import system, which effectively solves a graph replication problem (translating the structure of the app data to the Slapdash graph and keeping it in sync). We then built a graph database on top of Postgres, added a data access layer with graph semantics, with GraphQL API delivering the data to the client.

Of course, the data we store is encrypted on disk, in-transit and in the data store. Slapdash employees can't see the contents of what we index since everything except the reverse index is encrypted. It’s not zero-access yet, but we’re building in that direction [1].

What we discovered is that by applying optimizations to how we store (sharding & colocation) and retrieve data (batching & coalescing) we could achieve an almost zero-latency [2] experience when browsing application data. As a result, it's much faster to browse Google Drive in Slapdash than in the Drive interface itself.

While the low-latency file system is interesting, we learned that being able to search and navigate is not enough utility for a single individual. People don’t search as much as they think they do, and most have their unique information foraging habits that work well-enough.

However, we wanted Slapdash to be useful for anyone, not just an employee at a big company, so we turned our attention to building a new experience on top of the file system. Our goal was to take a leap in speed with which people can control their computers. We thought this was possible because the difference in UX between desktop and cloud app environments was so acute: the desktop OS is principled, integrated and fast, while cloud apps are latency-laden and confined to crowded browser tabs.

To that end, we built the Command Bar (Command Line + Search Bar). The Command Bar is best experienced as a desktop app, where it’s invoked with a global shortcut. You can quickly search your apps, file tasks, peek at your calendar, create zoom meetings, etc: all with a couple of keystrokes. Of course, you can also write your own commands too.

In practice, it meaningfully cuts down the time you spend controlling the computer. For example, filing a task on GitHub might take 10 seconds of just navigating to the right screen, while you can start writing the task title within 2 seconds by invoking the "Create New GitHub Issue" command with the Command Bar. Things like searching for a customer record, doing a quick spreadsheet calculation and even routine things like opening an existing document are measurably faster. [3]

For teams and companies, Slapdash provides a unified interface to a team’s collective knowledge. This has traditionally been reserved for top technology companies, but we are bringing these advantages to everybody else. And for the individual, we are making the use of disparate cloud apps feel closer to the classic experience of a desktop computer OS - fast, integrated and more productive.

We are still figuring out what apps to support, what commands we should build and how we can open up the platform for others to build on as well. We would love to hear from you on any of those counts and any feedback you might have!

[0] Facebook has something called "intern" and Stripe has an internal product called "Stripe Home".

[1] Content is stored using ECIES (with Secp256k1 curve and AES256 cipher in CTR mode), public-key-encrypted with individual per-user, per-app key pairs.

[2] It's actually not zero latency, of course, but by preloading most things on the hover state we can cut ~50ms of perceived latency (as long as the server response time is under that, which we try to do, it feels instant).

[3] We use the keystroke-level GOMS model to evaluate interface speed, but the speed difference here is large enough that it can be intuited.

Example of filing a task on GitHub: Time controlling computer: open browser, command + L ( focus location bar), type partial URL of repo until it auto-completes, wait for page to load, click on Issues, wait for page to load, click on “New Issue”. Expressing actual intent: typing title of task.

Filing a task with Slapdash: Time controlling computer: Type Command + J, type “Cre gi” to fuzzy match “Create New GitHub Issue” command, hit enter. Expressing actual intent: typing title of task.

[gk1]

This looks amazing. Coincidentally, I was just looking at the Slapdash page in Zoom's app marketplace.

Comments on the marketing front:

Awesome tagline ("Work across..."). Much better than what's on the homepage now, about operating system for work. Monday.com is pushing the "WorkOS" thing[1] and it doesn't convey much. If it catches on and people start saying "We need a work OS!", then by all means jump on the bandwagon and catch that sweet, sweet organic search traffic. Until then it's meaningless.

Business users don't seem to like searching. It requires them to think, and to know what they don't know. I've seen this play out at many companies: Marketing creates a bunch of sales enablement content and organizes it in a central place like Drive, but the sales team just uses the same 1–3 pieces of content (or nothing at all). That's why there are a bunch of "sales enablement platforms"[2] that provide not just search but context-aware recommendations.

Every search product has this issue, which is why they all inevitably introduce suggested searches to aid with discovery, or even recommended content/actions to skip the search altogether.

The command line seems super interesting. I suggest having loads of templates for people, otherwise the blank canvas requires people to think too much and to know what's possible (you see the pattern here). Flexible and powerful products like Retool, Asana, Airtable, and Netlify Functions have paradoxically low activation and feature-usage rates unless they supply users with templates[3] or at least ideas on what's possible.

[1] https://monday.com/enterprise/

[2] https://www.g2.com/categories/sales-enablement

[3] Airtable goes a step further and lets users share their apps or discover other people's apps: https://airtable.com/universe. I imagine a bunch of your users would want the same (or similar) custom commands, so a showcase might be helpful.

PS - In the time I spent writing this, two people already commented that they need to see more use cases to understand the value, thus validating my point above about not making people think.

[kanevski]

Thanks for the feedback.

At the moment, the easiest way to unlock functionality is to connect an app. We will be building a lot of the interesting commands to start, so there should be no work required and should help the "blank canvas" problem.

However, custom commands are quite powerful, but we don't do a good job showcasing what they can do and how you can create them. Our team, for example, has a set of shared commands which streamlines a lot of our day-to-day work, but it's unclear to other what might be good commands to create.

Improving the command building experience and complimenting it with templates is definitely at the top of our list of things to improve.

[shay_ker]

This sounds interesting at a high-level, and the octopus is cool, though I'm having trouble understanding how it'd impact my day-to-day. There's a gif on the homepage on how to... add to a "space"? I'm not totally sure what value this would bring to me.

Do you have a gif or video showing someone already set up with everything, and then show them solving a few problems? And maybe even a side-by-side with someone trying to do the same thing, without Slapdash?

[kanevski]

For folks that use are comfortable with using the keyboard, we recommend installing our desktop application. The desktop application adds a global shortcut (Cmd + J) by default, which you can use to pull up Slapdash.

If you use launchers like Alfred or Spotlight, you can think of it as a drop-in replacement for those tools. The difference is that Slapdash can capture not just your desktop environment, but your cloud apps (and browser) too. The benefit is similar here too, it's a faster way to use your computer.

Side-by-side is a good idea, we really should make some videos like that.

[orliesaurus]

Also came here to ask to see more examples of day to day usecases!

[betocmn]

Ok, I have to confess this is the quickest sale ever. Two minutes on the website. Five minutes on comments here. Another ten minutes trying the desktop app.

I'm ready to pay.

[summitsummit]

so did you end up paying?

[jesalg]

This is very cool. I just installed it.

I was curious, can you speak to how this differentiates from https://getcommande.com/?

[kanevski]

Both Slapdash and Command E can search apps, but Slapdash can do other things too:

* You can also write to applications, it's not just read-only (create docs, file issues, close tasks, upload files, etc.)

* You can browse the structure of applications in Slapdash (not just search them).

* You can build sophisticated queries (show all tasks open tasks, that mention this customer, render it as a list)

* We are client-agnostic. While we love our desktop client, you can also use Slapdash just in a browser window, or as a Chrome extension (and soon mobile).

* You can control your desktop computer too (launch apps, search local files, etc.)

* You can build your own custom commands and share them with others (this turns out to be quite fun)

[dbla]

Could you speak to security of information that I allow Slapdash to access? I'd be very interested in using this, but how do I know the sensitive information that I give you access to is secure?

[dimitriko]

No much magic here, we use pretty standard protocols and approaches for security.

The data stored is public-key-encrypted (buzzwords: ECIES, Secp256k1, AES256+CTR), and the decryption private keys (per app/user) are available only to the very last and isolated layers (e.g. in particular, right before the search snippet is sent to your browser, or right before the text is tokenized and converted into an inverted index which erases the information about the actual words location in the text). The engineers can’t see the users' data.

App access- and refresh tokens (which we obviously need to send API requests to the apps you connect) are stored the similar way. They’re only decrypted in a separate layer right before requests are sent to remote cloud apps' APIs.

[rokobobo]

I think this is relevant. It's cool that you've mentioned a couple of "competitors" -- which are internal to large tech companies.

Would you guys be open to providing a self-hosted solution for large clients?

[Gipetto]

So, does this mean that users hand over permissions to a 3rd party to index internal company systems? So you could read a Confluence instance, or some other kind of wiki, and be a vector for data/security leaks?

Seems like there should be a "talk to your security team" disclaimer... people get fired for granting access like that.

[kanevski]

We don't take security lightly, but we don't do a good job articulating how we safeguard things in the product. We'll fix this - thanks for pushing on it.

There are details throughout this post, but I will summarize our high-level approach.

* When we request permissions, we request a minimal set. For example, you can connect Drive with just meta-data access and our access will be scoped accordingly.

* Everything is encrypted. Importantly, it's also encrypted in the data store itself. If our DB was compromised, the entries would not be readable (ECIES, Secp256k1, AES256+CTR). Only exception is the reverse index.

* The operations that involve encryption / decryption of encrypted content live in an isolated layer.

* Token storage follows similar methodology

* We get a pentest and security reviews quarterly

* We also have strict company policies around IT and infrastructure access

That said, we aren't ever at a terminal point in our security story.

Our experience has been that security conscious companies simply turn off ability to connect third party applications.

[somishere]

Very cool! I've connected two shared gdrives from work and am finding it infinitely easier to navigate than my usual workflow.

Couple of very minor FYI's i've noticed on the macOS app:

- on logout the ui redirected to a text 'error' screen (no ui / obvious blip) .. had to quit. The webui worked as expected redirecting to the homepage. I'd initially signed in to the wrong email account.

- When 'app visibility' is set to 'Just in menu', cmd+j-ing into the command bar causes the app to reappear in the dock and needs to be (x)'d again.

[kanevski]

Cool, thanks for the reports. Will fix.

[rimjongun]

One idea would be removing apps from the "Connect Apps" list after I've connected them. Also app requests: - Digital Ocean - Wordpress - Ghost - Basecamp(?) - Signal(?)

Exciting stuff, web interfaces can suck.

[kanevski]

The reason some apps are not removed after you connect them is that you can connect more than one account. For example, you can connect multiple G-Drive accounts.

That said, it's definitely confusing in its current form, so thanks for highlighting it.

The apps you suggested are definitely within reach (except for maybe Signal). We don't integrate any CMS's yet, but I think it would be quite helpful, especially for folks who tend to interface with them a lot.

[yarone]

Great job with the description above; sounds incredible. Installing and playing with this now. Nice work, congrats.

[bravura]

This looks great, I was just thinking yesterday that we need something Greplin (YC10) these days

[ipsum2]

Agreed, this is like Greplin (Cue) but with better UX! Any comparison to https://usejournal.com/? Slapdash uses similar terminology (e.g. Spaces)

[retendo]

Why didn’t you call your company ctrl j? Then I would never forget that shortcut.

[_zuta_]

Yes, you're right. Today we're not doing a good job at teaching people about Ctrl+J. Thanks for pointing it out. We'll make it better.

By the way, you can override the shortcut in Preferences (see "Global Command Bar Shortcut"). For instance, I changed my shortcut to CMD+SPACE (I already had a muscle memory for this shortcut since before I used Spotlight on Mac OS).

[karakanb]

Congrats on the launch, this looks really cool and I'll give it a try.

Just a quick note: the GitHub connect page asks whether it should index the private repos or not, but when I try to connect my account even after I disable it the oAuth page says that you'll be able to read and write to the private repositories, which seems to contradict with what I assumed I'd achieve by turning that flag off.

[dimitriko]

Thanks for reporting this! Sometimes apps support only "all or nothing" permissions (called "oauth2 scopes"), i.e. to request feature A from the app, we have to request features B and C too, because some scope enables A, B and C simultaneously.

But this particular GitHub case seems to be different. So it's fixed.

[ablekh]

Congratulations on your launch and best wishes! Interesting stuff. Having said that, I think that I have seen another startup offering something along the same lines. I don't remember the name, but should I recall or find it in the ocean of my bookmarks, I will return here and add a comment.

[iudqnolq]

Any plans on a linux client?

[kanevski]

Yes, it's almost ready.

You can actually download a linux build from: https://download.slapdash.com/

The one thing we have left is fixing auth. We auth in the browser and then open the desktop app to pass the auth tokens to the desktop client. However, this hand off is more difficult to achieve with Linux (can't just open slapdash:// URLs as easily as you can on OS X and windows).

There is a work around hack, where if you can get the auth token from the browser and manually add it to Slapdash.

The steps are: Open Chrome Dev Tool Console right inside the desktop app (F12 or Shift+Ctrl+I) and run something like:

location.hash = "#/lt?token=..."

We will of course build a more person-friendly UX before we make the linux client more widely available.

[kanevski]

OK, we put the finishing touches on the Linux client and it's now available for download.

We still have some fit & finish things to improve upon, but it should be quite functional.

We are new to this, so don't hesitate to reach out with suggestions, we're still learning.

[WesleyJohnson]

This looks awesome. I recently upgraded from Spotlight to Alfred and the productivity went way up. Slapdash seems like it would do that, again, 10 fold.

Do you support local installations of the listed products, specifically Gitlab and Jira? If not, any plans to work that out?

[kanevski]

What do you mean by local installation?

Certain products have a desktop app counterpart. For example, Notion, Trello, Figma, etc.

Slapdash is aware of those applications and when possible will opt to open things inside the desktop app vs a browser tab.

[Cilvic]

Awesome, I'm longing for something like this for a while. Especially for many cloud systems like salesforce etc. Reminds me of Bloomberg terminal.

I tried signing up, but receive no confirmation email to jmechtel posteo.de

[kanevski]

I just checked and it looks like the confirmation email was blocked.

One way to unblock is to sign up with a Google account (which won't require the email verification).

Otherwise, feel free to email me ([email protected]) and I can help confirm your account.

[marvinblum]

This looks like the command menu we designed for Emvi [1]. I like seeing this taken to the desktop. It feels really good just to type in a command and get where ever you're trying to get faster than by clicking. This is what I like about Linux too.

[1] https://emvi.com/blog/a-new-experimental-user-interface-QMZg... - it looks different than in the article, as it has changed quite a bit in the past few months

[mindhash]

interesting product. atleast something I would want to use.

In my earlier job we had several repos and being new to the job, I had to search often to understand how a particular logic is handled. sometimes the search will lead to a doc or internal wiki.

I had tried getFYI but I am much faster at typing than browsing.

Also the command line looks useful too. Do you allow custom tasks? Like I do SSH often on the servers to check logs. I would love to do all of it in one go:) You could do something similar to visual studio build config.

Good luck.

[kanevski]

That's a really neat idea to be able to search logs quickly.

We definitely support building custom commands, but they are super limited today. We have to build the sophisticated commands ourselves. However, we will be opening up our toolkit, so if you have ideas on dev ex of building a command or how you would want to rig them up, feel free to reach out.

Feel free to shoot me an email (ivan@) if you want to brainstorm some commands and how they can work.

[awinter-py]

oh man finally the reckoning for 1-5 second latency on every cloud product

[cercatrova]

Looks good, this reminds me of https://usefyi.com/, any difference between the two?