TLDR; Say goodbye to digging for links, and say hello to Bookmark’s new Slack integration. 🤖

Before jumping into this week’s lineup of new product features, I want to take a moment to thank you for being one of Bookmark’s first 100 newsletter subscribers! 🎉

If you’re new here and haven’t yet read the story behind Bookmark, check out my February 16 update for all the details.

Now, let’s talk product. 😎

What’s New ✨

I regularly ask myself whether Bookmark is more product-constrained or more distribution-constrained. If the bigger barrier to adoption is lack of functionality, then Bookmark is more product-constrained. If the bigger barrier to adoption is lack of awareness (i.e., people would use the product if they knew it existed), then Bookmark is more distribution-constrained.

At this stage, there’s plenty of room to grow along both axes. Moving Bookmark into open beta and launching a landing page earlier this month helped facilitate distribution, and I hope this week’s new features take the product to a new level. 🙌

• Slack integration (v1): This idea was first mentioned in my February 2 update, and now it’s here! Bookmark's Slack integration allows you to save links directly from channels where you and your teams are working. Add the Bookmark app to any Slack workspace, then assign a Slack channel to each Bookmark project.

  • /bookmark Slash command: After setting up the integration, you can type /bookmark in any Slack channel, followed by the URL, a comma, and a custom name. This shortcut will save the link to the Bookmark project associated with the Slack channel you’re using the Slash command in.

• Global search in the Chrome extension: Some of you have been asking for the ability to access links from the extension without opening the web app. Now, all the links across your projects are at your fingertips with the new global search bar built into the extension!

• Side note: Making search more powerful is a strategic priority for Bookmark because it minimizes the need for sorting. In a world where search always returns what you’re looking for, there’s no need to organize your links into folders — only to spend more time updating and maintaining them. There’s a fantastic passage about the central tradeoff between sorting and searching in Chapter 3 of Algorithms to Live By: The Computer Science of Human Decisions:

• New Home page with global search in the web app: When you’re logged into Bookmark, you’ll see a new Home page where the most recently added links across all your projects appear at the top — along with a global search bar to expedite the process of finding links.

• More comprehensive search results: Sublinks are now searchable! You should also see an overall improvement in the quality and scope of search results across all search bars in the web app. 🔍

• Security enhancements: There’s always more to be done on this front, but in the last two weeks, I wrote more comprehensive privacy rules to protect user data. As always, please reach out if you have any concerns!

What’s Cooking 🍳

User research is chugging along! The current round of interviews with PMMs has been very informative, and I’m excited to share some insights next time. Here’s a look ahead at the product roadmap:

• Search algorithms for matching and ranking: With all this talk about search functionality, I need to properly sit down and write some algorithms to make the search results more relevant. A friend of mine sent me the academic paper that started Google as a source of inspiration. I will not be writing any seminal papers, but a girl can dream. 🙈

• Slack integration (v2): Now that Bookmark and Slack are talking, I can imagine making this more of a two-way street. In v1, you can save links from Slack into Bookmark. For v2, I may explore pulling links from Bookmark into Slack so you can quickly share links with your team.

  • Slack App Directory: After a few more iterations, I’ll submit the Bookmark app to the Slack App Directory, but for now, it’s not officially vetted by Slack.

• Additional integrations: I plan to build other integrations to help you more easily centralize links in Bookmark, and I’d love your input! Gmail is a common request I’m hearing. What else would you find helpful?

• Displaying favicons consistently: I know how helpful it is to have favicons as a visual indicator, but they have proven to be surprisingly tricky to fetch in contexts outside of the Chrome extension (i.e. when links are added from Slack or the web app). Once I roll out a new solution, I’ll try my best to backfill any empty favicons.

Bugs Squashed 🐛

1. The Chrome extension now checks to make sure your Chrome profile and Bookmark account are in sync. If you’re not signed into Chrome with the same email as your Bookmark account, you’ll be redirected to the login page. Thank you to Brian for pairing with me on this one to get to the root cause of the error!

2. If you were running into issues with the Google signup integration, a fix went out on February 19. Thank you to Michael for reporting this bug! Please note that logging in with Google only works if you sign up using the Google integration from the get-go. (Google’s rules — not mine. 🤷🏻‍♀️)

This Week’s Ask 🙏

Though I built Bookmark with the workplace in mind, it’s been really fun to hear about personal use cases. From planning a wedding to researching job opportunities to compiling dinner recipes, we often find ourselves keeping track of links (and sometimes sharing them with friends and family). I hope you’ll try out Bookmark for a personal project, and let me know what you think!

That’s it for now. Thanks for reading, and have a wonderful weekend!

Nicole

Made with 💜 from NYC. Shout-out to Michael F., Rachel W., Brian Y., and Will C. for reviewing my drafts, and a special thank you to the Success team at Bubble!