The idea of hintlets.io was born while a group of people was working in a customer environment
and this customer had many, many, let's say a lot of abbreviations and nobody really was able
to explain, know about or even recall the meaning of all these abbreviation.
On the other hand side, due to that fact that every asset of the system was named with an abbreviation,
so this naming system is fundamental for the company. Even the description was an abbreviation,
because every device was a so called "TLA", means "three letter abbreviation". It took us a while
to understand and keep up with this recursion in the naming. ;-)
In this time, the project team realizes, that if a project gets bigger and bigger and company growths what is great, many other problems raises and the main problem is to managed the knowledge of the company or the project because people are joining and leaving and the domain specific language of the company or project stays and even growth.
Therefore, we create a simple app that help to link things together. This app was based on tWiki, but we had to customize and develop a lot and in the end, it was not a perfect tool. But we realized that the knowledge, that was in there, was that important that even the customer was ready to pay for this. And not for the tool but for the knowledge in the tool.
This was the time, where the first time the idea came up that people are willing to pay for their own knowledge. It sounds weird, but sometimes the knowledge is so hidden and ditributed, that even small to mid-tier companies are not any longer under control of it. In larger organizations this is true by default.
What we also realized was, that usually if you have information somewhere stored, this is not knowledge by definition because an information without any context is worth nothing or could even be misleading due to the fact that the same information in different contexts in most cases leads to different meanings. So it was necessary to implement a context in our app, that helps the users to really got the knowledge out of the information. In early stages, the context was defined by very simple tools or tags. But we realized, that in apps that are on the market, the idea of a context is hard to realize and hard to communicate, it always looked and felt like technology workarounds and does not offer any seamless user experience.
While working on the apps we additionally realized, that people that have the knowledge are beside a tool with a lot of information that key to the knowledge. Furthermore, the communication about information and topics makes the context omplete to understand and build knowledge perfectly. It sounds pretty easy but it took a while to count everything together and create a full picture out of it.
Based on these requirements, that were obvious we went on a journey looking for capable tools that could fulfill these specific requirements and we realized very soon, that either there is a tool that has everything but is so technical that it takes months to configure and customize everything and the user and the team then have a bad user experience or it is so complicated, that nobody is really using the tool. Or we found very easy to use tools but these are not really broad and feature rich enough to link everything together.
That was the perfect inspiration to start the journey and build the hintlets.io platform from scratch. It started as a simple idea and developed very quickly into a feature rich platform, that is still easy to use and bring people together.
We are so happy that you are using this platform and enjoying the ideas, we had and we hope that we fit the needs you have. But for us it is also clear, that this is a journey and as the platform started, it is still developing every day because with every new user case and customer and user, we experience more possibilities that we can offer on this beautiful platform.
So please feel free to register your own account, play around, generate benefits out of the knowledge of your team, peers, family, partners or co-workers and keep your knowledge under control!
your hintlets.io team