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Grain, a startup built atop of Zoom for note-taking and video-clip making

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Re: Grain, a startup built atop of Zoom for note-taking and video-clip making

#31

Post by jakecadams »

icelancer wrote: post #27
mgadams3 wrote: post #6

Hey HN. I'm Mike co-founder/CEO of Grain. I decided to start Grain b/c I was tired of requesting access to recordings of convos and repeating myself when I could just share the part of a recording instead. Our team built something pretty cool that I honestly didn't see coming when we started. Happy to answer any questions and thanks for the support.

ETA? I filled out the form and it said it wasn't quite ready for me (Founder).

Hey! this is Jake, Mike's co-founder. We don't currently have a windows app and only support Zoom users. If that's you, you can email me: jake [at] grain [dot] co

If not, we will be working on building out support for windows /linux in coming months [we use electron] as well as other VC providers.

Re: Grain, a startup built atop of Zoom for note-taking and video-clip making

#32

Post by mgadams3 »

missedthecue wrote: post #30
mgadams3 wrote: post #6

Hey HN. I'm Mike co-founder/CEO of Grain. I decided to start Grain b/c I was tired of requesting access to recordings of convos and repeating myself when I could just share the part of a recording instead. Our team built something pretty cool that I honestly didn't see coming when we started. Happy to answer any questions and thanks for the support.

Why did you name it grain

Thanks for asking.

We bounced around on really bad names like Radical (as in transparency/candor), Arthur (everyone has a seat at the roundtable), Zebra (literally just a placeholder)...

But landed on Grain because it means something about our product. Grains are little pieces that can accumulate to become something meaningful. Thats what our video highlight clips are all about. Little nuggets that come from somewhere else but can stand on their own. We get most excited when thinking about what can be made when you combine the "grains" together.

Also easy to say, a real word, 5 letters and the .co was cheap and nobody else has claimed the mindshare around the word. Today we start working on our SEO game :)

Re: Grain, a startup built atop of Zoom for note-taking and video-clip making

#33

Post by mgadams3 »

crazygringo wrote: post #22

The video on their landing page does a vastly better job explaining how it works: https://www.grain.co/ I've got to say, that for meetings big/important enough where you've got someone dedicated to taking notes/minutes, this seems like it could be a really effective and compelling way of sharing meeting highlights/takeaways/fun bits with a broader audience, people who couldn't make it, or for posterity. A serious win…

Thanks, the video took a surprising amount of work but happy w/ the result.

You're exactly right wrt the dedicated real-time annotator. We created a information transfer framework for our internal product development/design that has helped us to see that for our product to work (highlight clips that don't suck)... you need a dedicated person who's job it is to annotate the content of the video stream in real time (aka taking notes). It's too complex to do well with AI... let the humans drive the car for a while if you know what I mean :)

Our core use cases so far have focused on where this dedicated notetaker is already the case and over time we can automate the annotation process and expand to more use cases without a dedicated notetaker.

The cool thing we've seen since releasing the ability to take collaborative notes w/ your team is that the annotating just kinda happens naturally... people jot down things they thing are important to the mutual benefit of everyone on the team (in the meeting and not).

Re: Grain, a startup built atop of Zoom for note-taking and video-clip making

#34

Post by nfc »

I was building something with a very similar same feature set (minus the sharing publicly) for the last few weeks to add as a feature to my platform, just less polished as befits a 1 person team with no funding :D.

There are a lot of things to be done to improve the utility of videoconferences once finished. The information is obviously less dense and parseable but also more rich. It's inspiring to see other projects working in the same direction

Re: Grain, a startup built atop of Zoom for note-taking and video-clip making

#35

Post by mgadams3 »

kyawzazaw wrote: post #29
mgadams3 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks! We think so too. We actually spent 9 months building a prior version of Grain that was basically a Google Doc w/ Zoom integration & time stamps. Ultimately, we threw that version away (kill your darlings as they say). People told us that what you described was the bigger problem b/c it was too much work to unlock a stream of recorded video w/ traditional post-hoc video editing tools. But if it's easy enough t…

Really liking the integration with Notion.

Thanks. We do to.

We use Notion like crazy internally so it was at the top of our priority list along with Slack. I probably paste 80% of my links into Slack... it's magical b/c people just watch, get the context and then discuss... I hate information dumping and Grain + Slack saves me tons of time to share video highlights instead and they work better anyway b/c it preserves the context and richness of the original video (with voice, tone, facial expressions, screenshare content, etc.). All of those get lost when trying to summarize a video call to info transfer to someone else.

I find myself pasting Grain highlights in Notion when I'm doing more analytical work that I want to be supported by rich media/evidence and become a source of reference/documentation. Think highlight reels.

Re: Grain, a startup built atop of Zoom for note-taking and video-clip making

#36

Post by mgadams3 »

nfc wrote: post #34

I was building something with a very similar same feature set (minus the sharing publicly) for the last few weeks to add as a feature to my platform, just less polished as befits a 1 person team with no funding :D. There are a lot of things to be done to improve the utility of videoconferences once finished. The information is obviously less dense and parseable but also more rich. It's inspiring to see other projects…

That's awesome. No doubt there is a lot of greenfield in this area of communication.

Re: Grain, a startup built atop of Zoom for note-taking and video-clip making

#37

Post by MichaelApproved »

mgadams3 wrote: post #6

Hey HN. I'm Mike co-founder/CEO of Grain. I decided to start Grain b/c I was tired of requesting access to recordings of convos and repeating myself when I could just share the part of a recording instead. Our team built something pretty cool that I honestly didn't see coming when we started. Happy to answer any questions and thanks for the support.

Are you concerned that zoom will gradually add these features to their core products?

Re: Grain, a startup built atop of Zoom for note-taking and video-clip making

#38

Post by mgadams3 »

melvinroest wrote: post #28

This post inspired me to repost [1] my side project that I open sourced as a PoC a while ago. I saw "note-taking" in the title and my project allows the type of note-taking that I envision should happen a bit more often (using a stylus). The code is open-source, so I invite the co-founders of Grain to take a look and see if the idea might be useful to them :) [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22896157

Thanks! Will check it out!

Re: Grain, a startup built atop of Zoom for note-taking and video-clip making

#39

Post by mgadams3 »

Ken_Adler wrote: post #25
edmundsauto wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you talk about the value you've gotten out of doing this? It sounds very interesting, but also fairly effort-intensive. Does it also help you remember meeting takeaways, because you're actively reviewing your recent day or two?

I do it mostly so I don't have to repeat myself. :) I use the clips so that others can gain from the kernals of wisdom those clips provide... without having to commit to some portion of an hour to find the kernal themselves. Saves everyone time and enforces compliance to decisions made ) Also, of course, by manually editing down a deeply technical discussion from an hour to 20 minutes helps me REALLY listen and under…

As a fellow workflow efficiency nerd.. I salute you. Would love to learn about your manual workflows sometime.

Re: Grain, a startup built atop of Zoom for note-taking and video-clip making

#40

Post by perlgeek »

mgadams3 wrote: post #6

Hey HN. I'm Mike co-founder/CEO of Grain. I decided to start Grain b/c I was tired of requesting access to recordings of convos and repeating myself when I could just share the part of a recording instead. Our team built something pretty cool that I honestly didn't see coming when we started. Happy to answer any questions and thanks for the support.

Since you built your product based on another vendor's platform, are you concerned that they might cut off access? Do you have any contingency plans for that?
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