Tell your friends about Trotto!
If a product launches without posting on Product Hunt, did it ever really launch? Yes and no. While Trotto has been alive and kicking for about three years now and real life companies are creating go/ links like rockstars, we haven't done a full-fledged launch.
And so, at long last, this week we are officially launching Trotto! My goal with "launching" Trotto is to introduce you to the tool again and share why I'm excited about dedicating all my time to growing it.
But what are go/ links?
Helpful to start out with a definition: What do go/ links do? Why use go/ links?
go/ links solve for organizations the problem that domain names solve for the public web: No one
can remember IP addresses like 172.217.1.142, but anyone can remember google.com.
Indeed, go/ links originated at Google as a way
to relieve SysOps of the pressure of frequent requests for changes to internal DNS. Like an IP
address, most URLs you access in your organization are impossible to remember too, but go/ links
let you assign a memorable alias to any URL, making it easy to remember and share with your team.
For example, you can create go/roadmap to get to your product roadmap, or go/okrs to get to
your company's OKRs.
Accessing and sharing information are universal challenges, and I feel strongly that virtually every organization could benefit from this deceptively simple tool.
Doubling down on open source
A big part of this belated launch is doubling down on open source, with a platform-agnostic stack and updated documentation. We originally released Trotto back in 2017 as a closed-source SaaS solution. Over time, we recognized that we could best realize the dream of every organization in the world utilizing go/ links by giving folks great flexibility in how they adopt them. So, both the Trotto application and the browser extension are open source. (The browser extension is the easiest way to make "go/" work.)
What's inside?
Trotto has everything you'd expect from a go/ links solution (including the ability to create, use, and modify go/ links that are shared with your organization—and with nobody else) plus functionality and resources above and beyond like:
- Google SSO
- A browser extension for instant go/ links goodness, no DNS required
- A searchable go/ links directory
- Admin roles
- Programmatic links and quicksearches
- Webhooks you can use to extend the tool (examples: Slack alerts, backups, failovers)
- Documentation
- This blog, thus far featuring an interview with Benjamin Staffin about the origin of go/ links at Google, and a case study with Figma
If you read this and do one thing, my dream would be for you to tell one friend that Trotto exists and help one more organization seize the power of go/ links.
We're just getting started. Trotto will continue to evolve, and I'm eager to hear from you! Email me at jon@trot.to or submit an issue on GitHub. Thank you for reading!