Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 120 posts

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

#101

Post by brunovegreville »

mitchellst wrote: post #100

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…

Great point, well articulated. Our product does not officially support Exchange (mostly due to dev bandwidth limitation :( ) BUT if you can subscribe to your Exchange calendar in a Google Calendar (linked to any Google Account) then you can try Hera without any frictions because Hera will be able to pull your meetings from the Exchange calendar.

I've seen resources for that: https://www.howtogeek.com/435975/how-to-show-an-outlook-cale....

Let me know or shoot me an e-mail at bruno at hera dot so if you need any help!

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

#102

Post by mitchellst »

brunovegreville wrote: post #101
mitchellst wrote: post #100

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…

Great point, well articulated. Our product does not officially support Exchange (mostly due to dev bandwidth limitation :( ) BUT if you can subscribe to your Exchange calendar in a Google Calendar (linked to any Google Account) then you can try Hera without any frictions because Hera will be able to pull your meetings from the Exchange calendar. I've seen resources for that: https://www.howtogeek.com/435975/how-to-sh…

Thanks for the response, and the link.

The trouble with this method is that it creates a publicly-accessible, unauthenticated feed of my calendar and all the event data in it. I don't deal in a lot of particularly sensitive trade secrets, so I'm less concerned than others on this thread about the notes being unencrypted in your cloud. Encryption would be great, but I have a reasonable expectation that you're not just letting anybody who finds it scoop up your whole database. But that's what publishing a calendar feed does. I can't leave an open door to the internet (however obscure) to all the potentially confidential information that someone might send me as part of an event. I'll have to wait for "real" exchange support.

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

#103

Post by willk »

brunovegreville wrote: post #20
dmix wrote: post #18

Does this integrate with Zoom? I’m guessing notes are stored on your server?

- Hera opens whichever videoconferencing tool it finds in the calendar invitation (and we open Zoom links with your native app) - Right now your meeting notes are not encrypted, but stored in a secure database on our server. We are currently considering two options to make sure your notes are safe: either end-to-end encryption on our servers or offline-based storage for your notes.

I would personally like to see offline storage.

Your current model of unencrypted on your database is a big no for me.

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

#104

Post by alach11 »

corry wrote: post #24

Really like this, congrats on the launch! To the people moaning about Electron apps... you're not the market. To the people moaning about $100 price... you're not the market. To the people moaning about Mac-only... you're not the market. To the people who missed the value-prop COMPLETELY and think some free taskbar widget is the whole idea... you're not the market. IMO if you're managing 10+ people and have 10+ meeti…

My mind also immediately went to Superhuman while reading about Hera. I think the product has a lot of potential!

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

#105

Post by djrogers »

I like the concept here, but absolutely cannot abide anything that makes it more necessary to have laptops open in meetings.

If this were iPad or iOS focused, I’d be far more likely to use it for me and my teams, as cutting down on laptop distractions has been one of the big meeting wins.

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

#106

Post by subpixel »

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.

Consider that if you were selling an email product customers like this would demand local storage for that too.

The market for people and large companies who have already gone full Google Apps is huge. Focus there.

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

#107

Post by subpixel »

kareemm wrote: post #46
louisebayssat wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you very much for this detailed feedback :) - Your analysis of Streams is very on point -> as of now, users struggle to understand what it does. in the next few days, we're gonna automatically create streams for your recurring meetings and you'll see them in a dedicated space. It should be easier with the adoption moving forward. But basically, streams are like tags for emails. - The product as it is indeed bet…

I would think hard about whether keeping notes in Hera is important. I'm not sure it is. Personally I already keep other notes and meeting notes on my filesystem though I'm moving things to Evernote. But I don't want meeting notes in one place and other notes in another. And unless Hera becomes a tool for non-meeting notes, I'll use Hera to take meeting notes but keep them elsewhere. Re: Streams - still not entirely…

I disagree. An app like this has to mail reviewing all of my notes and finding things. I think exporting todos and focusing on highlights is smart - that’s all you really truly need in the end. But if I put notes in I expect them to be there and to be accessible and useful.

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

#108

Post by subpixel »

mgkimsal wrote: post #77
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…

You're juggling a lot of stuff right now (congrats) but might suggest something like jetbrains' structure - $x gets me lifetime access to version X. The notion of "well you will get value from it over time" isn't, imo, a great way to frame it. Even if your feature set doesn't grow, you have connections to external services, and they will have changes over time that you'll need to keep up with (auth protocol changes,…

Another consideration is the goodwill this will create with your customers, increasing their tendency to promote you.

This matters more when your default mode is single-player than when your default mode is corporate buy-in.

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

#109

Post by brunovegreville »

alach11 wrote: post #104
corry wrote: post #24

Really like this, congrats on the launch! To the people moaning about Electron apps... you're not the market. To the people moaning about $100 price... you're not the market. To the people moaning about Mac-only... you're not the market. To the people who missed the value-prop COMPLETELY and think some free taskbar widget is the whole idea... you're not the market. IMO if you're managing 10+ people and have 10+ meeti…

My mind also immediately went to Superhuman while reading about Hera. I think the product has a lot of potential!

Definitely a big inspiration for us! Thanks:)

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

#110

Post by pantulis »

brunovegreville wrote: post #67
pantulis wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you are considering a native version, then you are not prioritizing multiplatform which is Electron's strong point. Why choosing it insted of something like Catalyst? Mind you, I am not against Electron apps on my mac (Evernote user here heh)

Good question, mainly two points: 1. We had deep expertise in Electron and web dev. We are 4 months old so we wanted to validate the problem AND our solution as quickly as possible. 2. Meetings, by essence, have many stakeholders. Some (if not most) of the attendees are not on Hera and this is where having our core product mostly web compatible will proved to be useful - we can easily spin up for instance a public pa…

Sounds reasonable to me!
Post reply on HN