Launch HN: Hypercontext (YC S21) – Meeting notes, actions, and OKRs in one app

I’m torn on these apps - they are an absolute godsend for new managers (because the usual practice, as you note, is “sink or swim” with bonus sharks thrown in for free). But they can become an issue later on, because they are trying to mediate a human interaction through an app.

Given that most managers are relatively new, I’m still hoping you have vast success :)

But there’s also a key bit of feedback in there - you might want to ensure there’s a good solo experience in there, too. That will also help you get into entrenched IT departments at large companies - you might not get the sale to the whole company off the bat, but you can capture key internal voices (if they can run your app without security concerns and off the corporate network)

Either way, good luck. Managers deserve all the support they can get, and engineers deserve better management.

I 100% hear you here. Meetings are inherently pretty viral, so stopping the multiplayer is actually quite hard. We've had to manage it in app fairly deliberately as user growth can happen too quickly and customers can get frustrated.

The main value for experienced managers is a) the ability to offload the mental energy of remembering to bring something up in a meeting, b) the sheer volume of direct reports that need to becared for, and for organizers c) some of the best practice busy work that accumulates value over time (eg: sending notes after the meeting). Actually have quite a few CEOs who have adopted

My only nit is we don't want to mediate a human interaction in app. Instead we want to encourage human interaction by removing as much of the the non-human interaction as we can.

your website appears to have a bunch of meta data on it from something called soapbox. If I link to your website in slack it comes up with a "That looks like a Soapbox link. Would you like to install the Soapbox app" message. I assume a recent-ish rebrand?

What was the thought process there?

Feedback on initial workflow:

1. Used sign in with Google

2. Immediately presented with calendar read/write permissions, declined.

3. Went back and signed up via email.

4. Was told that an org already exists but no details (did I make it earlier? Can’t tell.)

5. Told 13 days of trial remaining (was an org created yesterday or does it just round down to 13 as soon as one second has passed?)

6. Only one active user, me.

7. Create workspace is grayed out and can’t see how to actually create any content in the app (does it need calendars connected first?)

It’s promising in concept. Posting this in hopes it’ll help, not just to complain. I’ll ask for a trial reset in a few days, assuming I really was the first user to create our org so have that ability.

Ooo.. that's a clear edge case we should have caught. Thanks for the detailed documentation on the failed onboarding flow. We'll fix it!