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Show HN: Minutes – Save up to 20% of salespeople's time
Hey everyone,
I wanted to share something I've been working on that I think could be really helpful for sales teams. Minutes is a startup that utilizes OpenAI technology to automate the transcription and summarization of sales calls.
What Minutes is doing can be described in 3 steps:
1. Taking your audio or video and transcribing it to text
2. Taking the most important and relevant information and creating a summary, including key points and the next tasks
3. Creating a follow-up email, including the summary points and next steps
Story behind it:
As an entrepreneur who handles sales and marketing, I noticed a common challenge: the amount of time managers spend on creating call summaries and writing follow-up emails. Not only is it time-consuming, but it's also often a hassle to ensure accuracy.
To tackle this issue, I decided to delve deeper and spoke with several sales directors. Turns out, this problem is widespread, and even salespeople themselves dislike the administrative burden it brings. Inspired by these insights, I created Minutes.
Call to action:
Here's where you come in. Sign up for Minutes using the code "minutes_alpha," and you'll receive 60 free transcription minutes to play with the service. I genuinely value your feedback and insights, as they will help us refine Minutes and tailor it to the specific needs of sales teams everywhere.
Thank you for your support, and I'm eagerly looking forward to hearing your thoughts.
Warm regards, Bogdan, founder of Minutes
- codingdave 3y agoIt is an interesting idea. Transcription isn't new, but the extraction of a list of actions and bullet points is intriguing. It would need to be better than what a sales guy could get by copy/pasting a transcription into ChatGPT, not because sales guys are going to start doing that, but because Salesforce could whip out a wrapper for such things fairly quickly easily, so you need to be wary of having a strategy that is easily repeatable by a big player who already has a vast amount of sales people on their platform.
- bhd_ltk 3y agoThat's a good point, I keeping that in mind, but you have to start somewhere. I think we could build some features, that will be both hard to replicate and have strong value, but what will require first customers and cashflow. Also, the fact big players will do the same is a good sign of a market for me. But definitely, something to keep in mind.
- hoxmark 3y agoJust want to share this initiative as well, where you can do it locally: Mac App Store: https://apps.apple.com/no/app/jojo-transcribe/id1659864300?mt=12 https://apps.apple.com/no/app/jojo-transcribe/id1659864300?m... And open source: https://github.com/schibsted/WAAS https://github.com/schibsted/WAAS This is just the voice to text part
- xupybd 3y agoI was looking to sign up and see if it could work for our sales team but it looks like that is not possible without an invite code?
- josho 3y agoThis is interesting. Are you familiar with products like Gong and Chorus.ai for call recording, and outreach.io for automated emails? If I look at products like Gong it is very much a pain killer. It makes it possible for managers to coach their salespeople by reviewing sales calls and therefore close more deals. This however strikes me as more like a vitamin. It saves sales people some time from doing salesforce admin. I'm in enterprise sales and don't see the immediate benefit. However a more transactional sale I could see this may be more useful, but then I wonder if in a transactional sale are salesforce notes important? If you want a customer interview my email is in my bio.
- bhd_ltk 3y agoSure! Just sent you an email
- hosteur 3y agoInteresting. Would love to try it. What is a good way to record a phone call on iPhone? Or to record a meeting done in google meet?
- bhd_ltk 3y agoYou can use some call recording apps. like https://apps.apple.com/us/app/rev-call-recorder/id1314427915 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/rev-call-recorder/id1314427915 For meets you can use some screen recording apps, for ex. I use Vimeo Screen Recording extension for Chrome. That being said, of course it is important letting people who are on the call know they being recorded. If you would like to test the service, please sign up at https://minutes.technology/ https://minutes.technology/ using the code "minutes_alpha," and you'll receive 60 free transcription minutes to play with the service
- dangerous_dyl 3y agoWhat do you recommend to record meetings in non-intrusive ways?
- burnte 3y agoI'd suggest you don't. If I found out a salesperson was recording my calls without me knowing I'd not only cancel any business with the company, I'd blast them to high heaven and back. Knowing a call is being recorded isn't "intrusive".
- skmurphy 3y agoI share your sentiment but the reality is that many remote calls are recorded.
- seanhunter 3y agoIn many jurisdictions it's illegal to record people without their knowledge and consent and I would argue it is always unethical to do so. If you're going to record you should ask participants whether or not that's ok unless you're in an ongoing situation where recording is the norm and people have already consented to that.
- dangerous_dyl 3y agoOk yeah that makes sense! Thanks!
- burnte 3y agoI have a great method for keeping sales calls short, and pretty much 90% of my meetings are 30 minutes or less. * Agendas: I do not take a meeting request without an agenda. 50% of the time this eliminates the meeting because either it's a few questions than can be an email, or they cancel the request because doing that is too much work. This is ideal when people are using meetings to transfer cognitive loads to other people. * Time cap: All sales calls are capped at 30 minutes, no exceptions. * Know yourself: I do research on the product/company beforehand in my own time, and know my needs so that during the call we can skip the parts I don't care about. This alone takes 60 minute meetings generally to the 30 minute mark. * Take charge: I never let the salesperson lead the call. They're not the most important person on the call, I am. I'm the one with the need and the money. * Limit the scope: I skip all the prelim questions where they "learn about your business" which is just looking for other opportunities to pitch me things. I know my business, I know my need, let's talk about how your product fits that. While generally in the first few minutes it's a bit unsettling for the salesfolks, generally when I explain that my goal is to make this as quick as possible, the vast majority wind up appreciating my approach as they get off the meeting in 20 minutes most of the time. The problem isn't how much time salespeople waste on summaries, it's how much time they waste overall. Too much glad-handing and not enough focus. I'd much rather see a tool like this help salespeople cut their pitches in half than simply making a summary email I'll ignore.
- ghaff 3y agoIn general, MOST calls should be 30 minutes. There are valid exceptions but with the increasing default to video calls one of the trends I favor is a general shift to 30 minute calls for most purposes. Long pre-pandemic, as an analyst, I found that most topics could be covered in 30 minutes. If you were a client I'd cut some slack but otherwise 30 minutes.
- burnte 3y agoYeah, since I hit upper management in healthcare IT about a decade ago, I've been pretty firm about 30 minute limits and only RARELY do we go over. It's actually really great. After the initial shock they tend to like it a lot.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- tuatoru 3y agoThis is great. This is one of the key functions of a digital PA. Something I've been wanting Siri to be able to do for .. well, since I heard about Siri. "Hey Siri, summarize that meeting we just had and email the summary and action points to everyone."
- bhd_ltk 3y agoCool! Please sign up at https://minutes.technology https://minutes.technology using the code "minutes_alpha," and you'll receive 60 free transcription minutes to play with the service
- deprecative 3y agoI don't know about Apple but I know Microsoft is working on this. They've spoken briefly about all that. I think it was around the latest Build event.
- CyberDildonics 3y agoI don't think naming a product an overly generic name like 'minutes' is a good idea.
- pushcx 3y agoDon't offer to save 20%, that's a minor benefit. The sales team will still be working that time. Offer to increase sales 25%. That's a serious improvement. ((100-80)/100 = 25%)
- bradknowles 3y agoThis. You can only reduce costs by so much. And each time you reduce them, you make it harder to reduce them further. But if you can increase sales or increase profits, then there's no limit to how high you can go. Focus on the positive things you can bring to the upside, not the things you can do to reduce the downside.
- bhd_ltk 3y agoGood point, thanks!
- pfannkuchen 3y agoAnother way to save sales people time is to wear a t shirt that says “No, I don’t want it.”
- kentm 3y agoYeah, maybe instead of salespeople saving their time they could work to save our time instead.
- seanhunter 3y agoSeems like a super-useful service. Do you have any kind of private/gdpr-compliant hosting options? I know that will be important for some folks before they put any kind of business-confidential matters into such a service.
- bhd_ltk 3y agoThat's a good point, the one I am working on right now. As is today - no, but will be in several weeks.
- seanhunter 3y agoCool. To set expectations, I'm not in the market (although your thing looks cool), but it's a request we have made to analogous services in the past so I wanted you to know that there will be enterprise customers who will ask for such a thing.