“One thing I’ve learned over the years, it’s that you should just build something and put it out there. If people don’t care, you can fix it. If people care, then you’re off to a good start,” says Karri Saarinen, co-founder of Kippt. It sounds like advice he’s given at tens of RailsGirls events, but he’s put it to practice and reaped the benefits at his newest project. Kippt is a bookmarking platform designed for professionals to collect, organize, and share information easily.
The service operates through a bookmarklet or browser extension. When you collect something to Kippt, the page and its content becomes searchable, organizable, readable on your devices and easily shared with other people. Kippt is flexible in the sense that you don’t need to worry about losing any bookmarks or information, or how you’re going to use the information, or where to put it.
When you bookmark a link, it gets put into your Kippt inbox, or to the folder you designate when bookmarking. Kippt also takes links from your “Read Later” folder and adds them automatically to your reading apps, like Instapaper and Readability. The end goal is really to become a total platform for information, taking care of how you collect information, how you use it, and and how you share and discover it.
The company got its start almost by accident. At the time, Jori Lallo, the other co-founder of Kippt, was working in San Francisco at Convore, a Y Combinator funded startup, while Saarinen was working at Grey Area in Helsinki.
“The first iteration of Kippt was built during our weekends and evenings. We just put it on Hacker News to get feedback,” says Lallo. “It hit the front page and an editor from RWW picked it up, writing a story and using our HN comments as quotes.”
So far their users have been mostly developers, designers, and also journalists.
“We’ve been also talking with companies, and I think every company I have ever worked for, collected and shared a lot of links and other information. However right now it’s quite broken into chats, emails and other places. There isn’t one clear place to collect valuable knowledge, discuss about it and reference it later,” Saarinen tells us.
There are plenty of strong competitors out there in this sector, like Evernote and Pinboard, but Saarinen says that these services are too focused on one type of content or information. “We think there is a lot more different kind of content or information, like Github repos, studies, presentations, not just news. Also you should be able to collaborate and discuss with other people.”
Kippt is already a polished product, but the team is now working on expanding the service beyond a website and mobile website. Lallo and Saarinen are also working on a new release to make Kippt more social, so users can easily share links with their friends and co-workers.
“When I’m thinking of building retention emails for Kippt, I can just take a look what I’ve collected. Google is pretty much useless in this regard, because of all the SEO spam. Quora is better but it’s still very limited since people need to take time to write the answers. What if you could just tap in to the best minds or people, and see what they find valuable?” asks Saarinen.
Kippt is currently a web app and mobile web app, although the company is looking into other platforms. The platform has also released an API, which saw some good traction, seeing 50 developers line up for it. “After couple of weeks our users built extensions for other browsers [1], libraries for Ruby, PHP, C# [2] and a backup tool [3]. Some people are even building native clients for mobile platforms,” says Lallo.
For the next months the company will be moved to San Francisco. On the agenda they will be growing the company and team. Before then, you can catch them at an event they’re throwing today in Helsinki.
Disclosure: Karri Saarinen is a co-founder of ArcticStartup. But the service is pretty cool and we would have covered it anyways.
