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Launch HN: Hera (YC S21) – macOS app to prepare, join and take notes in meetings

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Re: Launch HN: Hera (YC S21) – macOS app to prepare, join and take notes in meetings

#91

Post by prepend »

brunovegreville wrote: post #74
prepend wrote: post #70

I love the idea of a desktop app, but don’t understand the monthly fee. What’s the advantage to me as a user to pay $10/month for the rest of my career. Is it possible that you could figure out a one time price that lets me buy the software? I like the idea of improving my meetings, but try to minimize recurring fees. Also the price/value seems wonky as I pay $10/month for office365 with a TB of cloud storage

Great remark. The recurring fee is mainly tied to the fact that the value you get from Hera should grow over time. The more meeting notes you write into Hera, the more connected all your meetings will be and the more context Hera will be able to provide you in each meeting. It's not like a one-time tool that you always use to do the same thing. I am not saying that we won't test one-time price at some point, but it's…

I don’t understand what this means.

My meeting notes are just text files stored? It doesn’t seem to be doing anything extra over time and seems to just be client side processing so no long term external resources are required.

Re: Launch HN: Hera (YC S21) – macOS app to prepare, join and take notes in meetings

#92

Post by [deleted] »

prepend wrote: post #70

I love the idea of a desktop app, but don’t understand the monthly fee. What’s the advantage to me as a user to pay $10/month for the rest of my career. Is it possible that you could figure out a one time price that lets me buy the software? I like the idea of improving my meetings, but try to minimize recurring fees. Also the price/value seems wonky as I pay $10/month for office365 with a TB of cloud storage

[deleted]

Re: Launch HN: Hera (YC S21) – macOS app to prepare, join and take notes in meetings

#93

Post by brunovegreville »

prepend wrote: post #91
brunovegreville wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Great remark. The recurring fee is mainly tied to the fact that the value you get from Hera should grow over time. The more meeting notes you write into Hera, the more connected all your meetings will be and the more context Hera will be able to provide you in each meeting. It's not like a one-time tool that you always use to do the same thing. I am not saying that we won't test one-time price at some point, but it's…

I don’t understand what this means. My meeting notes are just text files stored? It doesn’t seem to be doing anything extra over time and seems to just be client side processing so no long term external resources are required.

Your meeting notes are linked together if they are linked to the same "group of meetings" (that we call Streams). So that when you enter your "Weekly Product", Hera gives you a quick access to the outcomes (highlights, next actions) of the previous Weekly Product(s) meetings

Also, Hera tries to understand (nothing fancy or machine learning-related) what you do with your meetings. If you always use the same template of notes in meetings with a title "1o1 John - Bruno", Hera will suggest you to do it for you in the future.

Re: Launch HN: Hera (YC S21) – macOS app to prepare, join and take notes in meetings

#94

Post by Shadonototro »

Yeah it's an electron app, this puts me off instantly, on my macbook i prefer to use native tools since my experience with electron apps = faster battery drain.. that's not desirable..

apple provide best frameworks to design UIs easily (SwiftUI), please use that

Re: Launch HN: Hera (YC S21) – macOS app to prepare, join and take notes in meetings

#95

Post by sciyoshi »

erichurkman wrote: post #28

I have been looking for a tool that better connects meetings to notes. I have some local scripting to connect meetings to notes and collect TODOs across my dozens of meetings/week. It looks like Hera could've replaced a lot of my custom setup! But storing in your cloud, and needing access via G Suite is a non-starter. You won't get much for early adopters in top-end enterprise if you need _yet more apps installed in…

There's definitely a segment of people for which GSuite access and cloud storage of notes is a non-starter, but in many cases those can be mitigated even when it comes to early adopters in larger enterprise companies (eg SOC-2 compliance). On top of that, you get a lot of the usual benefits when using a collaborative tool: others can help take notes for your meetings so that effort is shared, agendas can be prepared beforehand, contributed to by all the meeting attendees, and easily accessed via your meeting invite.

Re: Launch HN: Hera (YC S21) – macOS app to prepare, join and take notes in meetings

#96

Post by castillar76 »

brunovegreville wrote: post #65
pratio wrote: post #39

Hu bruno, I really like the project. There was an a comment by someone about $100 for a mac app. We pay for a many mac apps that solves a problem for us and at present meetings are an issue. I have been juggling among apps to solve this exact issue. The alternatives suggested like itsycal and meeter don't've the note taking and template support especially to look at the history of notes in previous meetings. This is…

Totally get that the safety of your meeting notes is top priority. We have not yet settled on whether we want to choose the "notes stored locally" path or the "fully encrypted on our server" path, mainly because of the impact on features we want to build in the upcoming years. We will communicate publicly as soon as we take a strong stance.

Be aware that the "fully encrypted on our server" path is still not going to satisfy many customers. At the least, many of them (like my employer) would want to insist on a "bring your own key" ability, and would ask a lot of questions about where your keys are stored, who has access to them, and what you have the ability to do.

Besides all of that, though, the "store files locally" option gives me the option to put those files anywhere, including in various cloud storage accounts of my own to share with other people, thus giving me a lot more flexibility and control over with whom and how I share meeting content. That might really be the better way to go.

Re: Launch HN: Hera (YC S21) – macOS app to prepare, join and take notes in meetings

#98

Post by brunovegreville »

pavankat wrote: post #97

how is this better than clicking on Day in google calendar and using a meeting notes template in notion?

To name a few: - Tight integration between your calendar and the context (notes, actions) related. The notes you take are automatically linked to this calendar event, the attendees, potential past related meetings

- The notes you take in Hera can feed into other tools, for instance Todoist for your next actions.

- Fewer friction points: you click on one button and it opens your Zoom/GMeet/... and your notes where you find back your preparation. Spinning a new page in Notion is not that hard, but you would be surprised by what small friction points do over time.

Re: Launch HN: Hera (YC S21) – macOS app to prepare, join and take notes in meetings

#99

Post by brunovegreville »

castillar76 wrote: post #96
brunovegreville wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Totally get that the safety of your meeting notes is top priority. We have not yet settled on whether we want to choose the "notes stored locally" path or the "fully encrypted on our server" path, mainly because of the impact on features we want to build in the upcoming years. We will communicate publicly as soon as we take a strong stance.

Be aware that the "fully encrypted on our server" path is still not going to satisfy many customers. At the least, many of them (like my employer) would want to insist on a "bring your own key" ability, and would ask a lot of questions about where your keys are stored, who has access to them, and what you have the ability to do. Besides all of that, though, the "store files locally" option gives me the option to put…

I agree with your analysis, but I think there is significant impact on features you can build on top of "store files locally", including collaborative features (sharing meeting notes without too much frictions) On a personal note, I prefer the locally stored path as well.

Re: Launch HN: Hera (YC S21) – macOS app to prepare, join and take notes in meetings

#100

Post by mitchellst »

I'm very interested in this. I think I'm the target customer and the loom demo made me think, "I need this." I work for a big company and have many meetings with many different stakeholders, and I love the incremental adoption where I don't have to persuade the company to buy something, I can just get it and plug it in for myself.

I have a blocker on plugging it in, though: we're a Microsoft Exchange shop. Now, it's easy to sync Exchange to my Mac calendar, but it is not easy to sync Exchange to Google calendar. (Googling, seems like the most reliable way is to PUBLISH your calendar... something I don't think my security / IT folks would appreciate.) I could also use Zapier it looks like, but I'd quickly run over the 100 tasks/mo in the free tier.

I have nothing against electron—power to you for solving a real problem I have, and using javascript to do it quickly. But I do think popping open EventKit to hook into the system calendar would be a solid next feature. Then people like me who are locked into Exchange will be able to use your product without ugly/brittle/security-degrading hacks.

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