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Hey all, Brett here, founder of Mindstamp / awkward dude in the demo video. I spent last year building a social video annotation app called Aech that never rea

Hey all, Brett here, founder of Mindstamp / awkward dude in the demo video. I spent last year building a social video annotation app called Aech that never really caught on, but captured interest from a couple people that wanted the core annotation technology for business. Mindstamp is the result of those conversations and six months of development work. It lets you enrich your videos with interactive notes (text, audio, video), questions, and personalization in just a few seconds before sharing them with your customers, clients, or teams. Video is growing rapidly but is still largely a one-way, static asset. Mindstamp aims to change that by providing an interaction level on top for both creator and viewer to exchange ideas and gather feedback. We're just getting started but think there's a lot of room to innovate here. Built 100% by me with Rails, VueJS, Vuetify, and Heroku ️ I'd love to hear your constructive feedback (please be nice, first real product shipped) and am happy to answer any questions you might have. And yes, I'm going to make a better demo video - it's just a placeholder for now. Thanks for reading!

MediumD 8y ago
This is a really, really cool idea! I may try and use this for a product demo video. What do you expect the primary use case of Mindstamp to be?
anonymous5133 8y ago
Interesting concept. There are other ways to do this but more for the technical savvy. So I could see where this comes into play in the sense that it is focused on a user friendly experience. The pricing options seem burdensome to me. The whole per month pricing is a deal breaker to me. The pricing language is confusing as well. What is up with all these stipulations? Videos expiring....is that really necessary? It needs to be simplified. When I see this service what I think is okay...I get it that interactive video is good and I need it so I want this service. So I want to add one, two, three or more of these interactive videos to my website. The type of pricing I would want to expect is some sort of flat rate one-time payment that is not monthly. You really need to rethink the pricing.I get it that you want the monthly income but you need to bring people in first with some sort of "wow, this is an amazing deal" type of offer. The 30 day trial does not cut it for me personally. Just me 2 cents.
- have_faith 8y ago
  Second this, pricing is a little hard to follow.
- ArtWomb 8y ago
  You'd have to drill down into the cost, but flat rate per year may be difficult to price before achieving scale. How much compute and storage does the average video require? One hour GPU compute may be on order of $1. 1TB cloud data store per year may be on order of $10. Charging $20 per video for unlimited annotation could be more sensible. Akin to Podscripter's $10 per episode podcast transcription service. Best of luck!
- tnorthcutt 8y ago
  Hey Brett, consider this a suggestion to completely ignore the pricing feedback above. Sure, you could price it based on your server costs, but that's a terrible way to run a business. Looks to me like you're pricing based on value and to deter support zombies, so stick with it! Don't worry about anonymous commenters on HN telling you your pricing is too high.
  - ddingus 8y ago
    Seconded
  - ladybro 8y ago
    Noted, thanks Travis :)
undershirt 8y ago
I like your speaking style, and the product idea is neat. As a snobby stickler for aesthetics, I think the instant darkness and silence at each pause feels like being unplugged too abruptly. I'd take a cue from dialogue options in games [1], and not let the UI cover the whole screen, and maybe play a prerecorded "pause" video(s) so the flow isn't broken. [1]:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GwgNc_wZwZ0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GwgNc_wZwZ0
- jeremyperson 8y ago
  Just a quick note to say I agree with this feedback. +1 etc. Nice product idea.
  - ladybro 8y ago
    Thanks Jeremy :) Noted on the feedback.
- ladybro 8y ago
  That's great feedback, thank you. I've been feeling it's a bit too abrupt as well - I'll make it smoother.
davedx 8y ago
Just want to say I think this is a great product and it's incredible you built it all yourself, I'm really impressed. I actually really like the demo video too -- it's personal and the outdoor location is a refreshing change from the typical sterile "recorded in an office" videos. Great work and good luck with it!
- ladybro 8y ago
  After months in the sometimes-not-so-happy dev cave, comments like this mean the world to me. Thanks so much, Davedx!
mrieck 8y ago
Nice work. I think your annotations of startup school lecture videos are useful. I'm also doing video startup in startup school, but mine is for making original animated cartoons/meme-mashups: https://www.superanimo.com https://www.superanimo.com Good luck with your startup.
- Kagerjay 8y ago
  this is interesting, what did you build this with?
  - mrieck 8y ago
    Thanks - I think the interesting part is converting the animations to mp4 which I do by loading the animation engine in node and using node-canvas to render each frame. Then I stitch those together and add sound with ffmpeg. I didn't use a framework for the editor. It's just a lot of jQuery and CAAT.js (a scene-graph animation library).
- ladybro 8y ago
  I'm glad you find them useful! If anybody's curious, you can find them at https://mindstamp.io/yc-sus https://mindstamp.io/yc-sus. SuperAnimo looks sweet. Care to share more about what you're doing technically to create the videos?
  - mrieck 8y ago
    Everything used to be just an HTML5 canvas, but since Automattic made a canvas renderer in Node I was able to use that: https://github.com/Automattic/node-canvas https://github.com/Automattic/node-canvas
mindgam3 8y ago
Really solid product. I have been needing a simple video annotation tool exactly like this for a project of mine. From the demo video it looks like you’ve executed on the concept well. Look forward to putting it through its paces!

MediumD 8y ago

This is a really, really cool idea! I may try and use this for a product demo video. What do you expect the primary use case of Mindstamp to be?

anonymous5133 8y ago

Interesting concept. There are other ways to do this but more for the technical savvy. So I could see where this comes into play in the sense that it is focused on a user friendly experience. The pricing options seem burdensome to me. The whole per month pricing is a deal breaker to me. The pricing language is confusing as well. What is up with all these stipulations? Videos expiring....is that really necessary? It needs to be simplified. When I see this service what I think is okay...I get it that interactive video is good and I need it so I want this service. So I want to add one, two, three or more of these interactive videos to my website. The type of pricing I would want to expect is some sort of flat rate one-time payment that is not monthly. You really need to rethink the pricing.I get it that you want the monthly income but you need to bring people in first with some sort of "wow, this is an amazing deal" type of offer. The 30 day trial does not cut it for me personally. Just me 2 cents.

have_faith 8y ago
Second this, pricing is a little hard to follow.
ArtWomb 8y ago
You'd have to drill down into the cost, but flat rate per year may be difficult to price before achieving scale. How much compute and storage does the average video require? One hour GPU compute may be on order of $1. 1TB cloud data store per year may be on order of $10. Charging $20 per video for unlimited annotation could be more sensible. Akin to Podscripter's $10 per episode podcast transcription service. Best of luck!
tnorthcutt 8y ago
Hey Brett, consider this a suggestion to completely ignore the pricing feedback above. Sure, you could price it based on your server costs, but that's a terrible way to run a business. Looks to me like you're pricing based on value and to deter support zombies, so stick with it! Don't worry about anonymous commenters on HN telling you your pricing is too high.
- ddingus 8y ago
  Seconded
- ladybro 8y ago
  Noted, thanks Travis :)

undershirt 8y ago

I like your speaking style, and the product idea is neat. As a snobby stickler for aesthetics, I think the instant darkness and silence at each pause feels like being unplugged too abruptly. I'd take a cue from dialogue options in games [1], and not let the UI cover the whole screen, and maybe play a prerecorded "pause" video(s) so the flow isn't broken. [1]:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GwgNc_wZwZ0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GwgNc_wZwZ0

jeremyperson 8y ago
Just a quick note to say I agree with this feedback. +1 etc. Nice product idea.
- ladybro 8y ago
  Thanks Jeremy :) Noted on the feedback.
ladybro 8y ago
That's great feedback, thank you. I've been feeling it's a bit too abrupt as well - I'll make it smoother.

davedx 8y ago

Just want to say I think this is a great product and it's incredible you built it all yourself, I'm really impressed. I actually really like the demo video too -- it's personal and the outdoor location is a refreshing change from the typical sterile "recorded in an office" videos. Great work and good luck with it!

ladybro 8y ago
After months in the sometimes-not-so-happy dev cave, comments like this mean the world to me. Thanks so much, Davedx!

mrieck 8y ago

Nice work. I think your annotations of startup school lecture videos are useful. I'm also doing video startup in startup school, but mine is for making original animated cartoons/meme-mashups: https://www.superanimo.com https://www.superanimo.com Good luck with your startup.

Kagerjay 8y ago
this is interesting, what did you build this with?
- mrieck 8y ago
  Thanks - I think the interesting part is converting the animations to mp4 which I do by loading the animation engine in node and using node-canvas to render each frame. Then I stitch those together and add sound with ffmpeg. I didn't use a framework for the editor. It's just a lot of jQuery and CAAT.js (a scene-graph animation library).
ladybro 8y ago
I'm glad you find them useful! If anybody's curious, you can find them at https://mindstamp.io/yc-sus https://mindstamp.io/yc-sus. SuperAnimo looks sweet. Care to share more about what you're doing technically to create the videos?
- mrieck 8y ago
  Everything used to be just an HTML5 canvas, but since Automattic made a canvas renderer in Node I was able to use that: https://github.com/Automattic/node-canvas https://github.com/Automattic/node-canvas

mindgam3 8y ago

Really solid product. I have been needing a simple video annotation tool exactly like this for a project of mine. From the demo video it looks like you’ve executed on the concept well. Look forward to putting it through its paces!