Show HN: Meetter – Reduce time wasted by meetings

Hey, HN!

This post is not about useless meeting tips, nor about some new tool that drains remaining calendar hours.

Like most of us, I’m very frustrated by the amount of time wasted by meetings. Why most of us here hate meetings is well described in PG’s essay: http://www.paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html

There is also a great solution that worked for YC: office hours. Ok, but how can this help a regular maker in a regular company?

Most makers struggle with the meetings scheduled by their colleagues, so let’s focus just on the company internal meetings.

What if every maker will have her/his own office hours few times a week at different times? Yeah, that probably won’t work. Makers & managers often need to meet in 2+ groups...

OK, what if all makers within the company will have office hours at the same time? Would be nice, but that won’t scale as it will require too many conference rooms and switching rooms fast enough may not be possible if someone has six 10min meetings with different folks…

Oh, wait, but what about video meetings? There is no room limit there and switching rooms takes seconds. Many of us work in distributed companies with a lot of meetings online already. Great, but there is still a problem with agreeing on times and booking small meetings within those hours. Also, what to do if there is urgent discussion and everything is overbooked ahead of time with non-urgent managerial stuff?

OK, so that is what we are trying to solve with https://www.Meetter.ai and would love to hear what you think about the early version. Please check How Meetter Works section on the landing page for more details.

Here is an open demo account just for HN: https://hn.meetter.ai/signup-demo After sign-up, just try to post few agenda topics with random people and see if you can join office hours scheduled Tue/Wed/Thu at 8 AM PT.

Neat! I’ve wanted something like this to use at Sourcegraph. We would like to be able to say “Alice and Bob, you two should chat about XYZ for 15 min sometime in the next week” and have some piece of software aggregate and schedule all those things. How much of that can Meetter do?

Interesting. I have a bunch of private notes on the subject from when I was last playing with startup ideas. The biggest hurdle I kept hitting was differentiating the startup within the calendar space, because it is a pretty well saturated space with a lot of entrenched players. (Similarly as bad as the Mail space, if not worse, just as we've seen several apps exit these past couple of weeks. Though some of those efforts have exited well for the startup founders, so that's an issue more for the overly conservative "local" VCs I was curious if I could get to invest, when I was putting my notes together…)

The partial pivot to automating web meetings is a neat idea, but the immediate concern I would see there is that now you're fighting two fairly heavily entrenched spaces, calendars and web meetings. Twice the battle fronts might mean twice the opportunities to exit, but it also might mean twice the opportunities to be out-competed/exhausted?

Looking forward to it!

Thanks for the feedback! If you have at least one hour of overlap - then you can just use that daily hour for Meetter. That is what we do within our team.

If that is a bit more complicated like: US, Europe & Australia. You may need to setup hours on 3 different intersections and people can decline those that don’t work for them and Meetter will use that information for scheduling.