Launch HN: GoLinks (YC W19) – Internal short links for teams

I think you have something useful here. This is something I've seen a number of large companies build/deploy internally because they've been burned hard on content migrations. In the enterprise noone is going to set up a .htaccess redirect unless it's for the CEO's document repository. Whether it can sustain a company larger than 1-2 people is a larger question.

* Have pages listing available links go/hr could take you to the HR homepage, but go/hr/_list would link everything that exists under go/hr like go/hr/holidays or go/hr/stockawards.

* Give users a personal links page with personal and private links. Allow the company to display custom news/content on this in a tasteful way. Internal comms want to get their content to users.

* Let users bookmark links from the _list pages I mentioned.

* If a user links another link shortener, or a page that has a redirect, either - remove those intermediate redirects, or flag it to the admin.

* Add some sort of safe site checking to "protect IT from the risks of public link shortening services." Not sure if you can reuse an online database for this.

* Provide RSS feeds of top links etc to import into the company's portal.

* Resolve page titles correctly. If someone pastes the link into a tool that looks up the go link for a preview, ensure you return useful metadata. This is a common problem now because companies have some stuff on-prem (their documents and tools) but are using a cloud chat tool. If you can work out a way to know that particular tools are scraping your link then you might be able to give a better experience.

Few questions:

1. [solved] How does it work? I couldn't get it from the website: 'go/' is not a real DNS-resolved domain but some host alias?!

2. [solved] If 1 is true, how do you want to target smaller to medium sized companies which just have G-Suite, Slack but no real intranet/private net where you could create this host alias easily for the entire staff? Guess I got it wrong, so I am happy about a technical explanation/architecture.

3. How is the business model's defensibility? What's hindering me to set up the same with some open source repo, write a Chrome extension, add a nice landing page and hire a sales force for SaaS enterprise sales?

EDIT: ok now I fully read your post and got my answer for 1 and 2 but how should this work on mobile where you don't have extensions?

You pretty much just listed out our current backlog. Great minds think a like! For the first item though, we plan to implement “tags”. The sub directory format actually causes links to be siloed under a specific subname, so if 2 links should exist across 2 sub directories, it would need to be duplicated. With tags, you can tag the link and aggregate the links with the tag.

For the 4th point about someone using another link redirect, that's an interesting use case. Should we change the link to the underlying link, removing the intermediate links, or treat it as its own links? I can see a user doing this to try and create their own analytics, or maybe they found it easier to copy an already shortened link. That's a great suggestion, and we'll look into that use case.

Yep, It’s in our terms of service, in the unlikely case something happens to GoLinks, we will provide you with all your links. But we plan on being around for a long time.