TAIPEI (Taiwan News) — Alan Chan (詹雨安) dropped out of university to co-found Heptabase, a Taiwanese-founded U.S. startup with a Taiwan-based team, that helps users store, organize, and share data, and has recently secured US$1.7 million dollars in seed funding.
Speaking to the Startup Island TAIWAN Podcast, Chan described the “knowledge networks” that users can create with Heptabase. Since new concepts are not always immediately applied, Chan said that the software allows users to create and store notes about concepts they are learning and access them when it is time to apply that knowledge.
Chan said he found Heptabase’s first users via social media app Telegram. He said he searched "visual, whiteboard, mind map," on Telegram, found interested users, and sent them a prototype so that they could provide feedback.
“So, the community grew organically; it went from zero to one to five, to now I think about 6000 members across 82 countries,” Chan said. He said that the team produces a new iteration of the product every day or two and that the product ships fast.
Chan said Heptabase is primarily focusing on the individual’s process of creating. “We believe it is more important to create a tool that can augment individual thinking before we can evolve this tool into a collective intelligence tool,” he said.
Chan said that Heptabase’s long-term approach is about building metadata and utilizing the information to find new ways to search for information. “I think we could create a new way that we have not seen before for discovering knowledge based on context rather than based on a keyword,” he said.
He said the name Heptabase was inspired by fictional aliens from science fiction literature whose language could communicate the past, present, and future simultaneously. “That gives you a feeling about why I built Heptabase,” Chan said, “it is about connecting knowledge between the past, present, and future, while preserving all the original context.”
Heptabase is currently entirely reliant on word of mouth for new users and does not have any trial plans available.
