Why I’m So Bullish On Almanac, A Startup You’ve Probably Never Heard Of

One Platform That I Think Has A Ton Of Potential

Working remotely will create an entirely new set of challenges for knowledge workers, as many employees and organizations are learning each day.

The lack of office presence makes it much more difficult to share ideas and casually discover what processes or pieces of collateral are working best.

Some form of a document repository or cloud-based file-sharing platform can be found in most companies, yet it’s still a burden to easily surface the best of the best template on a given topic. This challenge is even more amplified in organizations that are less tech-centric.

Almanac is an interesting company that is well-positioned to help drive significant value here. While this startup is clearly still in its infancy, there is a lot to be excited about here.

The company is bringing the best of organizational content and templates and making it available to everyone. According to the leadership team, it boasts an audience of over 10,000 experts from companies like Netflix, Stripe, Airbnb, among others.

For those of you who have ever used Quora, the popular question and answer platform, Almanac reminds me much of that ecosystem as experts are able to publicly share the best ideas and examples of how others can succeed both with daily tasks and career development.

In addition to helping to surface high-quality templates to things like marketing plans, sales emails, or human resources best practices, it also creates another interesting byproduct: personal branding for document creators.

What’s special about this part of Almanac is that it shows who are the top contributors on a given topic or template category, ascribing that person with a level of peer respect and expertise that is difficult to find elsewhere.  

Over time, that enables any given contributor an opportunity to build a strong brand and expert label on any area they focus on.

For example, if you are the vice president of human resources for your company, you could share out the structure of the leading documents you use that your industry colleagues could benefit from. After dozens or hundreds of downloads and upvotes, you are naturally perceived as a thought leader in your space. 

Then, if you take this level of credibility and share it on LinkedIn, then you’ve immediately up-leveled your public persona.

On top of all of this, the site has easy search functionality that makes it effortless to navigate. A basic query or a couple of clicks around the site will quickly direct you to the general documents you are likely looking for.

If you haven’t yet checked it out, I suggest doing so. I recognize there are similar competing platforms out there that do bits and pieces of what they do, but I found this one to be well designed and interesting.

I have no affiliation with the company, I just think it’s worth sharing. If you’ve had any experience with Almanac, I would love to hear it. Send me a note of what you like versus don’t like.