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Guru is a company wiki that works in your workflow, so the information you need to do your job is always at your fingertips. Share product information, streamline internal communication, and onboard employees faster than ever with Guru.
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Paul Watson
Any plans for card templates? I like the idea but face the "blank card" problem when trying to make one for a URL.
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@paulmwatson Hey Paul, thanks for the feedback! We definitely have card templates on our radar! We continue to receive similar feedback like yours and we want to do them all they are all so great! Additional ideas we've received are things like a "Form Card" that have specific form fields and layout or being able to create an email using the card content. We definitely have some more features to add and I really appreciate the feedback so far.
As much as I feel like this has a lot of potential, I have to admit, I'm having a hard time understanding what Guru does. The landing page is a little text-heavy and filled with vague phrases like "capture and share knowledge with your team". How does it help me do that?
I'd love to see more actual examples rather than animated images that don't have any real content on them.
Sorry, don't mean to be blunt. I just wouldn't want a great product to be lost behind unclear messaging. Don't make me think!
Sorry, don't mean to be blunt. I just wouldn't want a great product to be lost behind unclear messaging. Don't make me think!@alirtariq great feedback, thank you and I appreciate the honesty. I think what might help you is our explainer video:
Hopefully that better explains Guru and how it can help you share your knowledge and content with your team.
@mitchellstewart that's definitely clearer! That would be helpful to have on the landing page. Maybe even a shorter version of it. Thanks for sharing it.
+1 for Guru. We at FirstMark are not only proud investors, but daily users.
Guru has been invaluable for centralizing everything from standardized descriptions of our investments (e.g., "InVision allows designers to...") to overviews of the 100+ public/private events that we run ("Data Driven is the largest monthly Big Data event...")
Having these facts on hand right in your email is an enormous productivity boost, and a seamless way to keep our messaging consistent.
@dfkoz How many boards do you have going? What what are they for, specifically? Just trying to think through how to set something up.
@mibi check out some example screenshots above, you can see the kinds of boards we use at Guru. They include Competitive Positioning, Sales assets, Customer Onboarding and Success, Pricing, Technical info and even App Documentation. Hopefully that inspires you!
@ricknucci Since I have been struggling with that problem myself for a while, I think it's a very very compelling product ! Congrats on the amazing ideas (and I am trying the execution right now) :)
Notes :
-this is a problem that exists not only to onboard new employees, but also to maintain knowledge across the company for existing employees (I can't tell how many times I got asked the same "how are we different than", "how do we do this", etc... by the same people).
-my company, like many others out there, already has a fairly extensive knowledge base in place (namely Zendesk and Google Doc). Most of the articles couldn't fit in the "cards" format (technical "how-to"s, long descriptions) + I wrote a lot of them and it was so painful I don't ever want to have to rewrite them anywhere else (I am exaggerating but you get the idea). I may have missed it, but is there a way to integrate Guru to such existing knowledge repos (becoming the knowledge "search engine" across various repos instead of the repo itself) ? If not, any plans ?
IMHO, that would be a HUGE opportunity, but I obviously have no idea of cost+reality of such a tool ;)
-you seem to be targeting mostly Sales org (but you also mention Engineering org in your comments), and you seem to have an integration with Salesforce. Is that going to be your focus users in the near future, or do you plan to target broader groups like Engineering and Client Success/Support (with integrations with Zendesk/other ticketing and Jira/other issue & project mgmt tools) ?
@kevin_ferret Kevin - thanks for this, appreciate the feedback and questions! Yes I was in that role that you describe where you are answering the same questions over and over and never found anything that worked to relay this info to our customer facing teams such that (1) they would use it to find answers, and (2) trust that what they were finding was accurate! This led us to Guru!
RE: your questions:
Search engine: not currently....we have found that it becomes hard to make that kind of search scale because of the noisiness of the results. With that said, we definitely see customers create cards that are summaries of the zendesk article or or google doc, and in the card, link to the full doc. This allows you to have verification workflow run against the URL or doc to remind you to re-verify the accuracy of your content. This also allows you to tie this article/doc into the other apps your team uses, which leads me to your integration question...
Integration: Yes we use salesforce as an example a lot, as sales/sales enablement type use cases are pretty popular uses of Guru with our customers. However our Context feature lets you tie into any app your team uses as long as you are using the Chrome web browser. We sit on "top" of the app vs. needing to go against the API or install anything in app stores. You then configure Guru to surface specific cards based on specific URLs, or specific field(s) within specific applications.
Use cases: related to your last question, yes sales is a popular one, but the way to think of it is Guru sits in between your subject matter experts (like yourself) and your customer facing teams, such as sales, services, support, etc. and provides expert-verified content right to the customer facing teams in the fastest possible way, right from their browser.
Thanks again for the questions - happy to setup a demo for you sometime as well to go deeper into this stuff!
Thanks Clark!!
Hello Product Hunters! Looking forward to your questions and feedback!
Guru lets you capture the knowledge you want to share with your team, put it into their workflow and automatically keep it up to date by having your subject matter experts verify its accuracy. It's a browser extension so you have 1-click access to all of your team knowledge and don't have to change out of your current browser tab. Also using our Context feature you can tie Guru content to the apps your team uses so it gets pushed to them when they need it.
I have to agree with @alirtariq I just spent a few minutes signing up and still am unsure what exactly guru does or how it works. The onboarding was very vague. If I had been thrown into some demo content I would have had a much clearer picture (I think). Like Ali mentioned, the interface is very nice but I am having trouble understanding what it does or how it works. I would love to watch a video case study.
@ryanmarr thanks for signing up and posting feedback, we definitely appreciate it. I've posted an explainer video above that hopefully clarifies how you would use Guru. Let me know if that helps!
I can't speak to the product (yet!), but I can give a huge upvote to @ricknucci as both a great leader and a gentleman. Here in Philly, Rick devotes so much time and energy to developing our tech scene that it's amazing he has any leftover for Guru. Great job and good luck!
Just playing around with it, it seems quite well done. I would love to see a full implementation or play with one. It can be hard to know how to board/categorize things using new tools so an example would be awesome.
@mibi sure thing Jess, we will upload some example screenshots shortly, and our team will reach out to get u a less limited version to try out. thanks for the feedback!
@mibi Hi Jess, here's an example of a Board we use here at Guru to help us keep our messaging consistent. We've built a competitive positioning Board so all of us understand how we compare to other products and services out there.
(Edit for a better image link)
How does the Guru context feature work? Is it possible for Guru to retrieve cards based on the conversation in a help desk inquiry?
@ac132 Indeed! Guru context is able to do a full text search using the content of a support query against the Cards that you create within Guru. It's actually another internal use case of our own product here at Guru. :)
Nice product but the value proposition is not very clear IMO. Maybe a demo video on the website would be useful !
@anthonytuil thanks for taking the time! Check out the explainer video above, might help clarify things a bit.
@afhill thanks Andrea! yes, that is a great use of Guru. here is a post one of our customers, RJMetrics wrote about how Guru reduced sales rep onboarding from 5 months to 2: https://blog.rjmetrics.com/2015/...
@afhill thanks Andrea, great use case! One of the ways I use Guru internally is for engineer onboarding, it helps us keep our onboarding steps up to date as well as all of our tools and libraries we use.
@afhill I'm cofounder of RJMetrics and we wrote the blog post Rick linked to above. I can confirm that this is super useful for onboarding new employees. We started with sales people, but we're starting to role it out to other departments as well.
We used to have a big shoulder tapping problem, but Guru has crushed that. It's now a core part of how we educate our team.
Amazing product😀 whenever a new company registration takes place will be of great support.
Wow, I love this! As a developer, being able to share and keep information at everyone's fingertips is super convenient!