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Grain, a startup built atop of Zoom for note-taking and video-clip making
- atjoslin 6y agoI even used this for a family call the other day to clip someone's dumb joke and share it later with fam.
- jackdu224 6y agothis is pretty sweet stuff ed and team!
- mgadams3 6y agoThanks Ed's friend! We're lucky he joined our team at the very beginning.
- imron 6y ago> a startup built atop of... ...a third-party company that can kill your business at any time (see for example what happened with, twitter, facebook etc).
- edoceo 6y agoMaybe they shooting for an acquihire play? This thing is more of a Feature than a Product.
- mgadams3 6y agoZoom is just where we start (huge distribution channel and the most developed platform). As soon as you build your own WebRTC based thing... you're nuking millions of existing video based workflows you could otherwise tap into to create value. There are several 2-3 year older than us companies that are doing quite well hooking into the data generated from all the VC platforms without providing the VC service themselves. But yes, this was def the #1 objection of VCs when we raised our seed round. Fortunately we got others to believe that the first move we just launched is just one of many in a strategy sequence. Time will tell.
- alentodorov 6y agoDoesn't everything start out like that? How would you define a feature vs. a product? Could an app like Zoom be considered a feature of an OS because of its dependency of the host system to act?
- mgadams3 6y agoLike anything in start-ups it's a calculated risk. Zoom's app marketplace is designed to facilitate start-ups like ours as they move to become a platform. See https://marketplace.zoom.us/competition https://marketplace.zoom.us/competition. One of the partners behind it told me they had 600 applications so at the very least there are dozens of us! Dozens!
- starpilot 6y ago"Grain"... Black Mirror reference? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Entire_History_of_You https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Entire_History_of_You
- mgadams3 6y agoWill have to watch that one later.
- mgadams3 6y agoHey HN. I'm Mike co-founder/CEO of Grain. I decided to start Grain b/c I was tired of requesting access to recordings of convos and repeating myself when I could just share the part of a recording instead. Our team built something pretty cool that I honestly didn't see coming when we started. Happy to answer any questions and thanks for the support.
- icelancer 6y agoETA? I filled out the form and it said it wasn't quite ready for me (Founder).
- jakecadams 6y agoHey! this is Jake, Mike's co-founder. We don't currently have a windows app and only support Zoom users. If that's you, you can email me: jake [at] grain [dot] co If not, we will be working on building out support for windows /linux in coming months [we use electron] as well as other VC providers.
- icelancer 6y agoYeah, I am a Windows (mostly) Zoom (always) user for the purposes of Grain. I'd be willing to use iPad Pro / Retina Macbook to test though, looks like something I could really use. I'll email you.
- ianceicys 6y agoFilled out the survey too, same result. Really looking forward to your windows client being available! Thank you!
- mgadams3 6y agoFrankly we didn't anticipate my calendar filling up so we added my co-founder Jake... his filled up so we added our intern Max... his filled up so we're finding someone new. Stay tuned, thx for the patience.
- chirau 6y agoIs this a feature or a product? How about 9 months from now? There is a genuine concern with startups built "atop of" another product. There is a thin line between alive and dead in that space. Twitter devs can tell you a thing or two about it. Hopefully this is a catapult or an entry point. All the best, regardless.
- mgadams3 6y agoThanks for the well wishes skeptical but kind stranger! No doubt we're aware of the analogs and risks. Have spent a collective month in Zoom calls with other platform founders to understand the risks but feeling really good about Zoom as a GTM platform partner. Have mentioned in other threads but there's long-sequence of strategic moves at play and this is the first of them.
- shunicorn 6y agoI think this product is way overdue for how ubiquitous video has become, even pre-social distancing. Scrubbing through lengths of video to find the relevant clip is such a pain. I'm digging the integration features, e.g. slack, imessage I feel like this is one of those tools that will end up being used in ways not initially planned. Meme generation and reaction videos perhaps, lol. Good luck Grain team!
- mgadams3 6y agoThanks! We think so too. We actually spent 9 months building a prior version of Grain that was basically a Google Doc w/ Zoom integration & time stamps. Ultimately, we threw that version away (kill your darlings as they say). People told us that what you described was the bigger problem b/c it was too much work to unlock a stream of recorded video w/ traditional post-hoc video editing tools. But if it's easy enough to break the best content down into just the good parts that live on their own, independent of the parent recording file... well that unlocks some interesting things you can do to combine those blocks and share them in feeds w/ teams. But it all comes down the the quality of the content you make with the tool. So that's where we're focused first.
- kyawzazaw 6y agoReally liking the integration with Notion.
- mgadams3 6y agoThanks. We do to. We use Notion like crazy internally so it was at the top of our priority list along with Slack. I probably paste 80% of my links into Slack... it's magical b/c people just watch, get the context and then discuss... I hate information dumping and Grain + Slack saves me tons of time to share video highlights instead and they work better anyway b/c it preserves the context and richness of the original video (with voice, tone, facial expressions, screenshare content, etc.). All of those get lost when trying to summarize a video call to info transfer to someone else. I find myself pasting Grain highlights in Notion when I'm doing more analytical work that I want to be supported by rich media/evidence and become a source of reference/documentation. Think highlight reels.
- jaimex2 6y agoI wouldn't be spruiking 'built atop of' a product being banned by so many companies and schools. If anything you should be pivoting to support as many of the other popular video conferencing apps out there.
- mgadams3 6y agoI've been building apps on Zoom for 5 years (3 years building private apps for Zoom based schools) and I'm grateful for the recent news helping Zoom to prioritize critical things that Eric said himself that they should have prioritized a long time ago. The concerns are 100% valid, I'm glad to see them finally surfaced and addressed. I still like our odds w/ Zoom relative to WebRTC, their team is a proven mammoth. My son was on a Zoom call for school this morning... likely some PR relativity of the past week. It's a two horse race at this point Zoom or WebRTC. Most start ups choose to build on WebRTC and focus on new workflows, we chose to build on Zoom to add the most meaningful leverage we could think of (data utility) to existing workflows.
- eloff 6y agoYou'd be surprised that the adoption trajectory of zoom has only increased of late. The cases you talk about are the exception to the rule.
- notquiteacop 6y agoI want to hear about success for this, but building on zoom? Isn't that kind of like dumping waste into the bay, and then trying to build on top of those sludge heaps? It's totally possible, but is there not a better way?
- crazygringo 6y agoThe video on their landing page does a vastly better job explaining how it works: https://www.grain.co/ https://www.grain.co/ I've got to say, that for meetings big/important enough where you've got someone dedicated to taking notes/minutes, this seems like it could be a really effective and compelling way of sharing meeting highlights/takeaways/fun bits with a broader audience, people who couldn't make it, or for posterity. A serious win for workplace culture and communication generally. (Of course, you never know until you actually try using it for a few weeks.) But if this works well, hopefully Zoom buys them, and we'll expect to see Google and Microsoft build their own versions.
- mgadams3 6y agoThanks, the video took a surprising amount of work but happy w/ the result. You're exactly right wrt the dedicated real-time annotator. We created a information transfer framework for our internal product development/design that has helped us to see that for our product to work (highlight clips that don't suck)... you need a dedicated person who's job it is to annotate the content of the video stream in real time (aka taking notes). It's too complex to do well with AI... let the humans drive the car for a while if you know what I mean :) Our core use cases so far have focused on where this dedicated notetaker is already the case and over time we can automate the annotation process and expand to more use cases without a dedicated notetaker. The cool thing we've seen since releasing the ability to take collaborative notes w/ your team is that the annotating just kinda happens naturally... people jot down things they thing are important to the mutual benefit of everyone on the team (in the meeting and not).
- chrismorgan 6y agoI love that the automatic transcription shown in that video has errors. It’s realistic, while also showing that enough is accurate that it’s useful.
- mgadams3 6y agoYup, you nailed it. Our transcription will naturally get better over time but it doesn't have to be perfect b/c it's a means to an end in Grain. (creating/trimming video clips) Even perfect transcripts are still terrible to read most of the time b/c the dynamic nature of spoken dialogue just doesn't translate well across mediums. Google "Media Richness Theory" if you want to go down the rabbit hole on this.
- Ken_Adler 6y agoCan confirm the "new way of working" when it comes to video clips ... I have made it a part of my worklife to share with co-workers EDITED video highlights of zoom calls and training sessions. This includes conference talks I find on youtube (e.g. Kubecon talks) that I want to have colleagues view. I can usually cut down an hour talk/call. to around 5-20 minutes of good high impact content. Historically, I just record in the cloud on Zoom (using all the nice extra features around auto-transcript, recording speaker and shared screen separately, etc... ) and edit it in Adobe Premier. I've got the manual workflow down where this is something I don't do every day.. but several times a week is fine. Editing ain't pretty, but it is effective. Since the lockdown, I have been working on the other end of the "pipeline"... the INPUT to Zoom. After a couple of false starts (OBS, CamTwist, Wirecast...). I ended up implementing Ecamm Studio Pro.... Looking forward to exploring your tool....
- edmundsauto 6y agoCan you talk about the value you've gotten out of doing this? It sounds very interesting, but also fairly effort-intensive. Does it also help you remember meeting takeaways, because you're actively reviewing your recent day or two?
- Ken_Adler 6y agoI do it mostly so I don't have to repeat myself. :) I use the clips so that others can gain from the kernals of wisdom those clips provide... without having to commit to some portion of an hour to find the kernal themselves. Saves everyone time and enforces compliance to decisions made ) Also, of course, by manually editing down a deeply technical discussion from an hour to 20 minutes helps me REALLY listen and understand what the speaker is saying....and so it also helps me to continue improve my knowledge...
- mgadams3 6y agoAs a fellow workflow efficiency nerd.. I salute you. Would love to learn about your manual workflows sometime.
- melvinroest 6y agoThis post inspired me to repost [1] my side project that I open sourced as a PoC a while ago. I saw "note-taking" in the title and my project allows the type of note-taking that I envision should happen a bit more often (using a stylus). The code is open-source, so I invite the co-founders of Grain to take a look and see if the idea might be useful to them :) [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22896157 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22896157
- mgadams3 6y agoThanks! Will check it out!
- ungzd 6y agoLooks like a crutch for poor managery practices which are very common in today's IT companies: management stubbornly wants to get rid of ancient technology of writing and to return to even earlier oral-only society. As in oral-only societies, information becomes stored only in minds. After video meetings, no recorded information remains, so let's add recording of videos. Recorded videos are unsearchable and poorly seekable, so let's add voice recognition. This is ridiculous: supporting desire of managers to return to prehistoric times and trying to fix it with frigging cutting-edge deep learning. I would not say "trusted by great teams".
- nfc 6y agoI was building something with a very similar same feature set (minus the sharing publicly) for the last few weeks to add as a feature to my platform, just less polished as befits a 1 person team with no funding :D. There are a lot of things to be done to improve the utility of videoconferences once finished. The information is obviously less dense and parseable but also more rich. It's inspiring to see other projects working in the same direction
- shadowpawn 6y agoIs this like Camtasia for screenshooting, screencasting and video editing software? https://www.techsmith.com/video-editor.html https://www.techsmith.com/video-editor.html
- mgadams3 6y agoNot really b/c 1) Grain is real-time and 2) it's not a screen capture.
- raskilinov 6y agoHi Mike, What particular advantages do you see between grain clips vs written minutes from a meeting? In my field there are many instances where an item on the agenda is talked through for 15mins and the minute-taker can summarise into a couple of lines/paragraph. I'm struggling to see how a video clip can deliver a similar summarisation, unless someone has vocally summarised at the end for the clip.
- mgadams3 6y agoFrankly this wouldn't make for a great highlight clip. You could make it but nobody would watch it. Grain is best for that punchy quote you want to share mid-moment or for the summary 30 second wrap-up at the end. We have changed our dialogue to include these at the end of convos b/c that way it's easy to summarize conclusions and next steps to document and share with others. Most good meetings have these anyway.
- raskilinov 6y agoHi Mike, What particular advantages do you see between grain clips vs written minutes from a meeting? In my field there are many instances where an item on the agenda is talked through for 15mins and the minute-taker can summarise into a couple of lines/paragraph.
- jwr 6y agoSpeak of a solid foundation to build your company on...
- faeyanpiraat 6y agoThe "Trusted by great teams" section of your homepage lists companies like "Slack", how did you convince them to start using your product?
- justusthane 6y agoWhenever I see these, I suspect it's more along the lines of someone at Slack is using this product.
- exotree 6y agoThis is a correct way to interpret it. Just an email address sign up is usually used as enough justification to make the statement.
- yllus 6y agoI guess we only have anecdotal evidence to go on here, but except for exactly one case I've always seen the organizations I work for get and wait for a positive response to their request before they display our logo. Does everyone else's experience really differ on this?
- Colex 6y agoI have had exactly the same experience in my previous (and in my current) startup. I would never add the logo of a client without their consent. (maybe some don't follow that logic)
- lonelappde 6y agoYou aren't thinking like a growth hacker.
- akjssdk 6y agoIt is probably someone with a Slack corporate email address who signed up. At least, that is how most startups seem to define 'used by'...
- eastbayjake 6y agoVery cool stuff, two clarifying questions: - Does Grain require access to the Zoom API to work? (Is there some other screen capture / scraping at work?) Any known issues/restrictions with using this with enterprise Zoom accounts? - Can I record a Zoom meeting I was invited to, or just ones where I own the invite?
- mgadams3 6y agoGreat questions. - Yes, the only way to log-into Grain is with your Zoom account. It's been really seamless, they did a great job setting up those permissions. - Sort of. You can take notes if 1) It's your Zoom link or 2) It's someone on your team who is also a Grain user's Zoom link. There isn't currently a way to take notes across workspaces b/c we want the meeting host to be in control for privacy reasons.
- sureklix 6y agoGreat stuff! I'm a ML researcher / engineer in NLP, and I'm curious what sort of speech recognition tools you guys are using? I'm thinking of building really solid SDK's in this space:)