Was it fraud? Or were they a couple of plucky capitalists rigging the system to get by?
I guess it just depends on your perspective...
AI note-taking startup Fireflies was really two guys typing notes by hand
51–60 of 71 posts
Re: AI note-taking startup Fireflies was really two guys typing notes by hand
#52This strategy is often called a "concierge" MVP. You deliver the service you claim, but behind the scenes everything is incredibly manual. Once you've proved people like the service, you then go make the process less manual. Zappos and Amazon are both famous for doing this. p.s. -- I already put this in a chain, but the majority of comments are just claiming this is fraud. Thought it might be worth posting something…
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Re: AI note-taking startup Fireflies was really two guys typing notes by hand
#53Was it fraud? Or were they a couple of plucky capitalists rigging the system to get by? I guess it just depends on your perspective...
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Re: AI note-taking startup Fireflies was really two guys typing notes by hand
#54Earlier quoted context omitted.
1. It's not fraud. They were proving the market at an early stage while living on a pizza diet. 2. Their startup now does what it says on the tin. And it's now a unicorn. 3. To those claiming this was "unethical" - a large company providing this service would still record calls and have QA / engineers listening to calls to improve the service.
+1, this strategy is often called a "concierge" MVP. You deliver the service you claim, but behind the scenes everything is actually incredible manual. Once you proved people like the service, you then go make the process less manual. Zappos and Amazon are both famous for doing this.
And as long as you much a buck or two then who cares if you lie a little to the customers about what is actually happening!
Re: AI note-taking startup Fireflies was really two guys typing notes by hand
#55> "Sitting in someone's meeting uninvited is violation of privacy. They wanted a bot in the meeting, not an uninvited person," said automation expert Umar Aftab. "This way you sabotage trust and could incur legal implications." > "Good luck with all the lawsuits," added another. "This might read like a gritty founder hustle story," said software engineer Mauricio Idarraga. "But it's actually one of the most reckless…
> They charged $100/month for this. If it were free then whatever, but lying to paying customers about the service is not okay. Erm, to the customer , what is the difference between a bunch of humans transcribing your meetings or an AI doing it? If I'm paying $100/month to get my meetings transcribed, why do I care whether it's the founder, an AI, or magic pixie dust (but I repeat myself)? Misleading investors is a d…
> If I'm paying $100/month to get my meetings transcribed, why do I care whether it's the founder, an AI, or magic pixie dust (but I repeat myself)?
Why you, personally, care or not is your business. If you were one of the customers who bought an automated (AI) service and instead got 2 guys gathering info during meetings, and are okay with it and see no difference between them -- then cool-emojis.
or for a more pointed response, see: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45935354
Re: AI note-taking startup Fireflies was really two guys typing notes by hand
#56Earlier quoted context omitted.
+1, this strategy is often called a "concierge" MVP. You deliver the service you claim, but behind the scenes everything is actually incredible manual. Once you proved people like the service, you then go make the process less manual. Zappos and Amazon are both famous for doing this.
And as long as you much a buck or two then who cares if you lie a little to the customers about what is actually happening!
customers pay for the service, not the method-by-which-the-service-is-provided. If they explicitly sold it as a service without a human in the loop, then I think that's bad. If they just sold transcription..... then this is transcription.
Re: AI note-taking startup Fireflies was really two guys typing notes by hand
#57Sounds similar to builder.ai but on a smaller scale?
Re: AI note-taking startup Fireflies was really two guys typing notes by hand
#58This strategy is often called a "concierge" MVP. You deliver the service you claim, but behind the scenes everything is incredibly manual. Once you've proved people like the service, you then go make the process less manual. Zappos and Amazon are both famous for doing this. p.s. -- I already put this in a chain, but the majority of comments are just claiming this is fraud. Thought it might be worth posting something…
There are many times a service like that might not be fraud. For example, if you never explicitly said it was an AI, and if every detail of the service remains the same, from the customer's perspective.
The privacy implications alone make the difference between a human sitting in on your meeting and an actual AI enough to call this fraud. Giving it a fancy name doesn't change that.
Re: AI note-taking startup Fireflies was really two guys typing notes by hand
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
> They charged $100/month for this. If it were free then whatever, but lying to paying customers about the service is not okay. Erm, to the customer , what is the difference between a bunch of humans transcribing your meetings or an AI doing it? If I'm paying $100/month to get my meetings transcribed, why do I care whether it's the founder, an AI, or magic pixie dust (but I repeat myself)? Misleading investors is a d…
> If I'm paying $100/month to get my meetings transcribed, why do I care whether it's the founder, an AI, or magic pixie dust (but I repeat myself)? Why you , personally, care or not is your business. If you were one of the customers who bought an automated (AI) service and instead got 2 guys gathering info during meetings, and are okay with it and see no difference between them -- then cool-emojis. or for a more poi…
The whole point of running a business is that I deliver a particular good for a price we agree on but then how I deliver it is up to me within fairly wide latitude.
If, for example, I have found some way to make some equivalent part cheaper, it is NOT incumbent upon me to disclose how I did it to you or my competitors. In order to protect trade secrets that may give away the answer or process to a competitor, I may lie straight to your face to misdirect you or possibly to throw a competitor down the wrong trail. As long as I'm not causing you harm and am delivering to spec, I consider myself to have a lot of latitude.
In any AI implementation, the company principals would have access to the data anyway so security wasn't compromised. In fact, because of the fallibility of human memory, security is probably better than running the audio through possibly compromised systems running an AI in a data center god knows where. So, data security and provenance was not harmed.
Sure, if you specified not to use indentured labor and I subcontract it to Bangladeshi orphans, you have a right to be upset as the bad PR could harm you. That didn't happen in this instance--the labor was company principals.
I see lots of posturing, but nobody pointing to what violations occurred other than not using "AI". At no point has anyone in this thread demonstrated any harm to the end user beyond some very vague insinuations of "wrongdoing".
Instead, what I see is a bunch of people getting upset that they used "Disgusting Pixie Dust (direct employee labor)" instead of "Delicious Pixie Dust (AI)". If I'm being snide, I would point out that when the direction of substitution is reversed (AI instead of labor)--the HN legions would be celebrating the cleverness. If I'm being particularly snide, I would chalk the anger up to the fact that it nicely demonstrated that the AI Emperor isn't wearing any clothes and is making a bunch of people angry whose paychecks depend upon the emperor remaining naked.
Now, if they were pitching their "Custom AI" to investors while hand transcribing, that is a very, very different kettle of fish.
Re: AI note-taking startup Fireflies was really two guys typing notes by hand
#60Earlier quoted context omitted.
Except they were pretty transparent about there being a human in the loop. They were essentially selling an MIT engineering grad as your note taker for $100/mo, which is a steal. Google hires associate product managers from MIT to be note takers for $20k/mo
The quote taken from the article is: "We told our customers there's an 'AI that'll join a meeting'," said Udotong. How do you get from 'AI that'll join a meeting' to 'an MIT engineering grad as your note taker'? The rest about note takers is irrelevant when the problem is lying about the "note taker" as that could be the deciding factor for choosing a service, not price
Disclaimer I actually met Sam when he was launching this and I felt like he pitched it at the time as aspiring to make it do all the things. I guess that’s a lie since the ai didn’t work at the time.