Introduction
What a year: 2022 reflections
Ideas are contagious.
I keep thinking about a (fiction) book I read this year.
It chronicles a woman who trades being remembered for immortality.
But, she finds a loophole. People can’t remember her, but they can remember her IDEAS. So she dedicates her life to planting ideas that spread.
They appear throughout history in works of art and political ideology. She might be forgotten, but her ideas live on.
Ideas are incredibly powerful. They’ve shaped societies and the arc of history.
Scribe started with an idea. A pretty simple one.
Companies run on tasks and processes, but the knowledge of what to do mostly lives in people’s heads. (And if you’re reading this, chances are it’s your head). And as crazy important as this knowledge is, we somehow have just accepted this absurd limitation.
This was a problem hiding in plain sight.
So we asked —
What if we could capture the best of what everyone knows how to do — and make it available to everyone else — automatically?
What if documentation was an automated artifact of your work, instead of a separate (stale, time-consuming) activity?
And then, something pretty cool happened. This idea took root, stronger and faster than we ever expected.
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902,751 hours saved
Last year alone, you shared over 3 million Scribes, saving 902,751 hours of your precious time. (That’s $29,335,232 of meeting time, according to my math).
Scribe is now used by over 300,000 organizations, across 195 countries. That’s every single country on this 🌍!
You’ve told us that once you use Scribe you can’t un-see it. Now that you’ve found a better way, you can’t go back to:
- Unnecessary meetings.
- Copy/pasting screenshots.
- Manually writing guides.
- Fruitlessly asking (or searching) “how do I…”
That’s the power of an idea.
Building the best product for you
So we built on this in 2022. We asked: what if the best of what anyone knew how to do was at your fingertips, as you worked? What if your question was answered before you even asked it?
So we launched a number of features. (51 features in 52 weeks, to be exact). All are aimed at making it effortless and automatic to find info and answer questions.
Here are a few highlights:
🔎 Recommended Scribes
Context-switching is a huge hidden productivity sink. Rather than stepping away from your work to find the answer you need, we bring it to you. Recommended Scribes surface the most popular Scribes for whatever tool you’re on — all through the Scribe extension.
If you have a question on a particular website, chances are somebody else did too. Now you can easily access help within your flow of work. (It’s like what we all dreamed Clippy would be)
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👀 In-context viewer
In keeping you in the flow of your work, now you can also view Scribes right alongside your task — all in the same window. Just open the Scribe on whatever page you are working on, and it’ll follow you until you’re done.
📄 Pages
Processes can be complicated and require additional context. With Pages, you can combine Scribes and multimedia context (including videos, text and images) to share all the process info anyone would need. Whether onboarding a new hire, explaining new software, or orienting clients, you all got creative and made some pretty cool Pages. Here are a couple of my favorites from you:
- The Most Asked Questions in Notion — Answered!
- Sales Navigator Onboarding Guide
- Top 5 Tips for Getting Started on Slack.
👯♂️Teams
Scribe is inherently collaborative, and we brought your team front and center. Now you can see your teammates on your page, share feedback, view team activity and more.
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🏠New Workspace
If Scribe is your home base, we want it to be your dream home: well-organized, beautiful and easy to find your favorite things. We released a brand new UI, organization and functionality to make it easy to search and find what you and your teammates create, all in your Workspace.
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Oh, and not to mention we released:
- Templates.
- More powerful editing.
- Improved search.
- Sorting.
- Mobile (beta!)
…and way, way more. Check out a full list of our releases here.
So, what's next?
Scribe has grown far beyond an idea. It’s now a movement of people who believe (and now have seen) a better way to work. Scribe is now all of us — all of you.
So I dedicate every update, feature and GIF this year to you. You’re going to love what we’re cooking up for 2023.
And one last note. We’ll be doing more in the future to bring all of you like-minded people together. If you’re interested in a more formal Scribe user event (or have ideas), please send me a personal note at [email protected].
Here’s to the power of ideas — and the incredible people (YOU!) who make them a reality.
The best part? We’re just getting started. 😉
Happy New Year,
Jennifer
