YC Applications
His YC application put Notion third on a list of rivals. It became the only one that mattered.
Slite applied to YC in 2017 as \"the first note app designed for teams\": one founder, 400 users, $10 a seat. Notion got one clause on the form. Then Notion shipped 2.0 mid-batch, and Slite spent years on defence before it found its own lane. The form is below.
In autumn 2017, Christophe Pasquier applied to Y Combinator from France. His product was "the first note app designed for teams." He was a solo founder and said he liked it that way: "this situation suits me perfectly." He had written the first line of code a year earlier. The money came from eFounders, a French startup studio that had earlier backed Front.
The pitch borrowed Slack's shape. Chat had moved from people's private lives into the office. Notes, he wrote, would go the same way: "I'm convinced Note will spread from consumer to businesses."
The progress section is a private beta. 400+ active users across 50+ teams, a beta five months old, a team of seven, and no public launch yet. The biggest customer, ABTasty, had more than 100 people on it. He would charge per seat, "starting at 10$/user/month," and aimed to be "the obvious choice for SMBs up to 500 people 5 years from now."
The competitors answer splits rivals into three groups. First, word processors: Dropbox Paper, Google Docs, Word. Second, wikis: Confluence and Google Sites. Last, almost in passing, "hybrid tools like Quip & Notion."
Two more answers are worth marking. In the "something surprising" box he explains Word2Vec, a way to turn words into math, and adds: "at some point this algorithm could create a lot of intelligence within your Slite usage." And in the legal section, the code is led by "our 2 senior developers Pierre & Arnaud."
YC took Slite into Winter 2018. On 1 March 2018, less than three weeks before Demo Day, Pasquier posted his application advice on Hacker Noon and shared the form that got them in. His first company, he wrote, had been rejected by YC twice.
In April 2018 Slite announced a $4.4 million seed round led by Index Ventures, with eFounders and Y Combinator. Algolia's Nicolas Dessaigne also put money in. Slite said 3,500+ people in 300+ teams used it every week. In April 2020 came an $11 million Series A led by Spark Capital. TechCrunch reported 4,000 companies on the product, including Airbnb, Spotify and WeTransfer.
The Series A post had a line the application didn't: "When Pierre and I started Slite three years ago." The form had listed a Pierre as one of its first two senior developers. Slite's about page now lists Pierre Renaudin as CTO.
We found no priced round after 2020. Pasquier has put the total at more than $15 million.
The Notion story comes from Pasquier himself, in a LinkedIn post from December 2025. "Then Notion shipped their 2.0," he wrote. "We were in the middle of YC, heads down, shipping. Our numbers looked great. When you're small, you can grow even while losing." Over the next few years, roadmap talks turned into "Notion has X, we need X." His verdict: "We stopped having opinions. We were reacting." With small product companies, the tech teams the form planned to sell to first, "we were already too far behind."
There were cuts along the way. In June 2023 he talked on the saas.unbound podcast about layoffs Slite had recently been through.
What saved the company was a different customer. Pasquier says Slite had "hundreds" of large customers choosing it over everything else, so it built for them. That meant teams above 50 people who needed everyone to adopt one simple tool. Then came AI. While most of the team was on holiday, a couple of people built a prototype on GPT-3.5. It became Ask, an AI search over a team's docs, launched in February 2023. In 2025 Slite shipped a second product, Super, to search across all of a company's tools. On 10 June 2026 Super folded into Slite as the Slite Agent. Slite now sells itself as a "self-maintaining knowledge base": the agent spots docs that have gone stale and drafts fixes, and a person approves each one.
YC lists Slite as active, with a team of 40. The pricing page says 3,000+ companies use it. It does not say how it counts them, so that number isn't comparable with the 4,000 TechCrunch printed in 2020. The cheapest plan is $10 per user per month, billed yearly: the same headline price as on the form.
He put the wrong rival last. Notion got one clause on the form and then shaped the next seven years. But he priced it right first time. The Word2Vec line came true too: the "intelligence within your Slite usage" arrived, just from a bigger model.
The application below is exactly what he filed. Read it knowing how it ends.
Slite — Y Combinator, Winter 2018 · Accepted Reproduced verbatim from the founder's application. Source: getintoyc.com
Company
Describe what your company does in 50 characters or less.
The first note app designed for teams
What is your company going to make? Please describe your product and what it does or will do.
Slite brings transparency and accessibility to your team’s knowledge through notes, much like Slack brought transparency to your communication with chat.
Founders
Please enter the url of a 1 minute unlisted (not private) YouTube video introducing the founder(s). This video is an important part of the application. (Follow the Video Guidelines.)
_(no answer)_
Please tell us about an interesting project, preferably outside of class or work, that two or more of you created together. Include urls if possible.
As I'm a solo founder I will talk about one of my personal project, Wikiwars(wikiwars.co). It's a straightforward web app allowing you to play the Wiki game in real time with friends or strangers : you have to go as fast as possible from 1 page of wikipedia to another, using only internal links. The first challenge was to build entirely the app, from the conceptions to the development and design. The second unexpected challenge was to write a efficient script to find reachable pages in the vastness of wikipedia. Try it out and let me know if you enjoyed it ?!
How long have the founders known one another and how did you meet? Have any of the founders not met in person?
As of today, I'm a solo founder and this situation suits me perfectly. This is especially true as I have already built an incredible team of 7 people with huge ownership on Slite and as I'm helped by great mentors, starting with the french startup studio eFounders.
Having launched 2 startups with 3 cofounders, I know how hard it is to find the right co-founders. If in a near future I find someone with an entrepreneurial soul, fitting perfectly with the team and bringing essential value to Slite, It will be an evidence to incorporate her or him in the founding team.
Progress
How far along are you?
I wrote the first line of code 1 year ago, and the journey has been incredible. In a year, we designed and developed a real-time desktop app with a full-featured collaborative editor, with no technical debt.
We built an incredible team with the right skills in product and development. I kicked-off Slite technically, built the first version of it, and found Pierre and Arnaud, our 2 first senior developers. They had respectively built a chrome note editor with more than 50K users and a B2B collaborative business plan editor. More than their technical skills and experience, the cornerstone of Slite has been our human fit.
We launched our private beta 5 months ago, and with no public communication, we have a gathered a great set of beta testers, companies from 3 to 120 users, giving us incredibly useful feedback.
It allowed us to fix the remaining weaknesses of the product in order to launch our public beta in October. To handle this, we are now a team of 7, with 4 amazing developers, a sales, a marketing person, and myself handling the product.
How long have each of you been working on this? How much of that has been full-time? Please explain.
Full-time, I have hard times being part-time on something ?
How many active users or customers do you have? If you have some particularly valuable customers, who are they? If you're building hardware, how many units have you shipped?
We launched our private beta to a limited set of pilots 5 months ago and we currently have 400+ active users spread among 50+ teams. Interesting fact: we both onboarded small teams and SMBs. Our largest by far, ABTasty, has more than 100 users active on Slite.
If you have already participated or committed to participate in an incubator, "accelerator" or "pre-accelerator" program, please tell us about it.
Slite is funded and benefits from the thorough help of eFounders, a startup studio that previously accelerated Front & Hivy among others.
Idea
Why did you pick this idea to work on? Do you have domain expertise in this area? How do you know people need what you're making?
I launched Slite because note is an evidence to me. Like Chat went from private sphere to business sphere with software like Slack, I'm convinced Note will spread from consumer to businesses.
Note is more than writing, it's holding our personal knowledge, and nothing is as powerful as sharing knowledge. That's why we're building Slite: to have 1 place for teams to make the content that matters to them both transparent and easily accessible.
What's new about what you're making? What substitutes do people resort to because it doesn't exist yet (or they don't know about it)?
Slite replaces all the tools you use to write content that matters: Word, Google Doc, wikis, the list is long.
The biggest change is that we're bringing the ease of use & access of notes to teams, and therefore giving them a go-to tool to write things down and a clear view of what exactly had been written by their teammates.
Who are your competitors, and who might become competitors? Who do you fear most?
We have 3 types of competitors : \- word processors that are becoming more and more collaborative among which Dropbox Paper, Google docs and Word \- wikis like Confluence & google Site \- And eventually hybrid tools like Quip & Notion, trying to solve project management and knowledge while making documents evolve
What do you understand about your business that other companies in it just don't get?
Word processors focus on independent docs, Slite is all about the big picture. And when Wikis see knowledge as static, Slite sees in it all the information that matters, and retains value over time.
In short, for the first time an app makes the bridge between all the information that matters across a team, wether it's processes, how-tos, day-to-day learnings, meeting minutes, or whatever brings value to the rest of the team. And Slite leverages the power of notes to make this information clear for everyone.
How do or will you make money? How much could you make?
We'll sell Slite on a pay-per-user model, starting at 10$/user/month. The potential here is really similar to Slack's, as we intend to be the obvious choice for SMBs up to 500 people 5 years from now.
How will you get users? If your idea is the type that faces a chicken-and-egg problem in the sense that it won't be attractive to users till it has a lot of users (e.g. a marketplace, a dating site, an ad network), how will you overcome that?
Our first customers are tech companies from 3 to 200 users. 2 very simple ways of sourcing them is to target Slack's paying users as well as companies relying on remote teams.
Legal
Are any of the founders covered by noncompetes or intellectual property agreements that overlap with your project? If so, please explain.
No
Who writes code, or does other technical work on your product? Was any of it done by a non-founder? Please explain.
Christophe kicked off the first version of the project. The technical part of Slite is now lead by our 2 senior developers Pierre & Arnaud, both highly invested, while the product development is lead by Christophe.
Is there anything else we should know about your company?
No
Others
If you had any other ideas you considered applying with, please list them. One may be something we've been waiting for. Often when we fund people it's to do something they list here and not in the main application.
Really not for right now but at some point in the future I'll build the next generation of remote tool, allowing with a set of mixed reality & 360 cameras to get the proximity effect you have with your teammate across the desk. While it's really still in my mind, I'd be happy to be challenged on this one!
Please tell us something surprising or amusing that one of you has discovered.
As I was working on a previous side project & getting into deep learning methods, I discovered the Word2Vec Libraries. Those are the equivalent of image recognition algorithms for text, and go way further: they let you modelize words in such a way that sentences and their meaning can be mathematically explained.
For instance, it will give you in output : Obama = Poutine + US - Russia
That's not by chance I chose this example, at some point this algorithm could create a lot of intelligence within your Slite usage.
Curious
What convinced you to apply to Y Combinator? Did someone encourage you to apply?
Feedback from startups that went through it. It feels like a must for companies like Slite that need to be mainstream super fast.
Plus, after having exchanged with Alumni, I have the sensation YC makes a lot of sense in 2 different cases: companies with the right energy but that need to pivot, and companies with a beginning of product market fit, ready to deploy really fast. Slite is definitely in this phase, and YC could be gamechanger for us.
How did you hear about Y Combinator?
It's all over the startup ecosystem
Keep reading
The rest of this article: His YC application put Notion third on a list of rivals. It became the only one that mattered.
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