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Show HN: Emdash – Slack/Zoom alternative for distributed team collaboration

emdash.io

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Show HN: Emdash – Slack/Zoom alternative for distributed team collaboration

#1
Hi HN, I’m Phil, one of the co-founders building emdash. Previously, I was an early engineer at Facebook and led Customer Products at Square.

We’ve focused on making chat and video work together so distributed teams can stay aligned without drowning in information. You can try it here: https://emdash.io.

It frustrated us how easily important conversations would happen and then disappear. Slack never quite matched how we worked. Channels were too coarse which led to noisy notifications and broken search. Zoom meetings weren’t much better–unless someone took perfect notes (which rarely happened), video calls became black holes of lost knowledge.

We spent too much time trying to find the information we needed to do our jobs.

To address this, we’re testing a few concepts and would appreciate your feedback on the value of the following:

(1) Automatically record, summarize, and transcribe your team’s video chats. We store meeting content directly inside discussions to facilitate search and discovery.

(2) Make it easy to manage & organize conversations of varying scope. A chat between team members can be forked into a dedicated Discussion with its own audience permissions and subscription. Individual messages or entire Discussions can be moved after the fact. Conversations can evolve unpredictably, so having the right tools to keep them organized post-hoc was important to us.

(3) Improve search with AI and hierarchical information retrieval. We use LLMs to uncover insights, summarize content, and connect the dots across related discussions, meetings, and documents. You can ask questions like “What are the team’s priorities this week?” or “What did we decide to do with feature X?” and get back a generative response AND deep links into the original chats and meetings.

Try it out: https://emdash.io and tell us what you think!

Show HN: Emdash – Slack/Zoom alternative for distributed team collaboration
emdash.io

Re: Show HN: Emdash – Slack/Zoom alternative for distributed team collaboration

#2
I should introduce the rest of the crew. We're a team of builders who have worked together for the better part of the last decade. Neville and I were early engineers on Facebook Ads. Neville later founded Rimeto, which was acquired by Slack. Fred has held various roles driving growth and was an early employee at Facebook, Doordash, and Rimeto. Nick jumped into startups right out of college, joining Rimeto and now diving back in with us at emdash.

Re: Show HN: Emdash – Slack/Zoom alternative for distributed team collaboration

#3
One note I have about your pricing page is that you don't explain what a startup or small to midsize team actually is. I would also much rather have a set pricing scheme immediately with a 60-90 day trial period similar to how slack works.

Re: Show HN: Emdash – Slack/Zoom alternative for distributed team collaboration

#4

One note I have about your pricing page is that you don't explain what a startup or small to midsize team actually is. I would also much rather have a set pricing scheme immediately with a 60-90 day trial period similar to how slack works.

Hi, Fred here – I’m one of the founding team members. Thanks for the comment.

First, to the question about team sizes. We view "Startups" as generally teams with Regarding pricing, we haven’t finalized it yet because we’ve prioritized understanding how teams actually use emdash—what works, what doesn’t, and where we should focus.

Pricing is important, and we want to get it right. Typical usage patterns, evolving AI and cloud/infra costs, and where we fit competitively in the market are all variables we still need to explore. We’ll need to strike the right balance and be competitive enough with vis-a-vis the market.

It would be smart to start with a free trial before transitioning users to a paid plan. We’re still figuring out whether that should be time-based (e.g., 60-90 days), usage-based (e.g., after your 20th video meeting).

I get it – no one likes unexpected pricing shifts and when the time comes, we will be transparent about our thinking and communicate changes well in advance. Our goal is to build something sustainable, not just for us, but for the teams that rely on emdash. Hope this helps clarify.

Re: Show HN: Emdash – Slack/Zoom alternative for distributed team collaboration

#8
post #6

product looks very cool - it's nice to see a consumer level of polish on a b2b experience

Thanks! One of the benefits of dogfooding our product everyday is that we invest a lot in working out the everyday kinks in addition to the marquee features.

Re: Show HN: Emdash – Slack/Zoom alternative for distributed team collaboration

#9
post #6

product looks very cool - it's nice to see a consumer level of polish on a b2b experience

Thanks! We’ve definitely put a lot of thought into making emdash feel smooth, intuitive, and frictionless. We are constantly looking at all the seams where pieces connect and making sure they fit tightly.

We probably over-invested in some details, but we believe those small touches add up, kind of like getting that nice “thunk” when closing a well-built car door. Glad you noticed the polish—it’s something we really care about!

Re: Show HN: Emdash – Slack/Zoom alternative for distributed team collaboration

#10
post #7

Great to see more competition in this space - I'm currently on Slack and not happy about it. Here's hoping Emdash can fill the void left by Workplace and get some momentum to put pressure on Slack. It's much needed

Amen. We've migrated teams from Workplace who really appreciated our hierarchical discussion model
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