We officially launched on Product Hunt today! Go check it out and don’t be shy about showing us support or dropping comments. There’s an awesome demo from Ryan that shows the entire product experience.

What took us so long to launch? And why are we launching now vs a month ago or a month from now? Good questions.

When Ryan and I founded Haekka in April 2020, our north star was that we wanted to help companies empower individuals with the right information at the right time to make decisions to protect their accounts, data, and devices. Since that time, with great user feedback and with the incredible changes to work that have been accelerated by work-from-home initiatives, we’ve evolved our north star to the following:

Haekka helps companies empower individuals with the right content at the right time and in the right place.

We decided to launch today because our product is in a place to deliver on that vision. 

The biggest challenge in terms of features was custom content. We knew continues and users loved trainings in Slack (we’ve gotten this feedback consistently from day one). We then discovered early on that users wanted content as a starting point but they wanted to be able easily customize that content. Then, we found out that once users could customize our content, they wanted to create their own training content from scratch.

Building out a simple to use editor that would handle formatting and delivery in Slack was hard but we released it last month and it’s battle tested now. In fact, we have companies using Haekka as a general training platform for onboarding training, policy acknowledgement, sales training, support training, and even technical security training.

So, Haekka is officially in Version 1.0 and out of beta. What does Haekka 1.0 include?

• Slack app for taking training - all training is done in Slack
• Admin web app - primarily used for user management, analytics, and content creation
• Content catalog - we currently have over 20 courses on everything from security awareness to HIPAA to GDPR to harassment to diversity / equity / inclusion (and more)
• User profiles - with levels based on engagement and performance on training
• Content editor / creator - it’s text editor that pulls Slack formatting and emojis into our web app. Also videos, images, and links
• Automated and manual reminders - we automate reminders when trainings have a due date or admins can manually send reminders to all learners or select users
• Weekly reports - sent in Slack to all admins and with built in actions like sending reminders
• Enrollment to individual, channels, or all Slack users - you can also sync channels and Slack so all new users are enrolled in trainings
• Weekly security tips - these are up-to-date security-related news stories with relatable, teachable moments that are shareable in Slack
• Weekly quizzes - admins can add weekly quizzes (fully customizable) to trainings to deliver weekly, topical campaigns to enrolled users

We still have some major roadmap items, such as Microsoft Teams support and improved content linking and logic (to name a couple), so this launch doesn’t mean we’re done building. It means we have a complete product to deliver on the JTBD of training employees where they work, especially as that work happens across timezones and via workflow platforms like Slack.