The "Trusted by great teams" section of your homepage lists companies like "Slack", how did you convince them to start using your product?
Those are presumed fake, unless the other company posts a testimonial or signs a full name to the claim.
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
#72Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is a correct way to interpret it. Just an email address sign up is usually used as enough justification to make the statement.
I guess we only have anecdotal evidence to go on here, but except for exactly one case I've always seen the organizations I work for get and wait for a positive response to their request before they display our logo. Does everyone else's experience really differ on this?
You aren't thinking like a growth hacker.
Re: Grain, a startup built atop of Zoom for note-taking and video-clip making
#73The "Trusted by great teams" section of your homepage lists companies like "Slack", how did you convince them to start using your product?
I only chose teams to put on the website that really use it regularly. We have a bunch more logos of the type others here describe that I could have chosen but that's dumb.
Two teams at Slack currently use Grain.
Behzod runs research and has been tweeting about his use of Grain a decent amount lately: https://twitter.com/beh_zod/status/1250900606073442305 https://twitter.com/beh_zod/status/1248740029901332481
Here's Jason from Podium: https://twitter.com/jregb/status/1250995517724585985
Here's Dustin from Lambda School (not one of the logos): https://twitter.com/dustint314/status/1250948975202426880
But the actual answer to your question of how is that it took a long time to build something they wanted to use. We've been building a version of Grain for about 15 months now, about 6 months on the product we just released and 9 months on a version we threw away.
Eventually we built up word or mouth of happy users that refer other teams. It's a grind to get real teams to adopt anything but it is possible with continued effort.
Re: Grain, a startup built atop of Zoom for note-taking and video-clip making
#74Earlier quoted context omitted.
SoundCloud said the same and they turned their back on the developer community. It probably happened to many other platforms too
Twitter has famously done the same thing a few times as well.
There are lots of differences but yes, it's a calculated risk we feel good about given those differences.
Re: Grain, a startup built atop of Zoom for note-taking and video-clip making
#75Earlier quoted context omitted.
Cultivating an app ecosystem on their platform is a publicly stated goal of Zoom. Cutting off any start-up building on it would be counter-productive and lead to their competitors gaining the advantage of innovation on their platform instead. See: https://marketplace.zoom.us/competition
What features does Zoom's developer API support? Which do you use, and how do you like them? What other features do you hope they support in the future?
Good question!
Here are their docs: https://marketplace.zoom.us/docs/api-reference/zoom-api
But we use everything around recording, including live streaming.
Zoom has a great team of folks in the developer forums that are really helpful. My biggest gripe would be that not everything that breaks gets documented and logged so it can be really frustrating when our service breaks b/c their webhooks are down and there is no status on their end that this is the case.
We had a list of a dozen thing we wanted them to support when they started and they are all now in there... so pretty happy w/ progress.
Re: Grain, a startup built atop of Zoom for note-taking and video-clip making
#76Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not really, Zoom has gotten to where they are by focusing on what they're world class at, which is reliable connectivity. I don't see them changing focus on anything but keeping the lead they have that made them so successful. This DNA has always been the core of Zoom since Eric branched out of Cisco.
Maybe I'm being pedantic but isn't it your job to be concerned about risks like this? It sounds like your answer is "we don't need a plan because the volcano won't erupt." I'm seeing people responding with a list of volcanos that erupted without warning. Approached more technically, I'd ask, do you have future plans to stratify what back ends your product will work on, particularly if zoom stops being an option?
Zoom is just one of many media input sources for us and the only one we launch with b/c the benefits outweigh the drawbacks.
Re: Grain, a startup built atop of Zoom for note-taking and video-clip making
#77Hey 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.
How did you convince a company like Slack to start using your product?
10 years of start-up network building has helped and so we got referred into them by people who they trust.
The bootstrap problem to get early teams before you have credibility is crazy difficult. It takes time to do it well and with authenticity.
Re: Grain, a startup built atop of Zoom for note-taking and video-clip making
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, I am a Windows (mostly) Zoom (always) user for the purposes of Grain. I'd be willing to use iPad Pro / Retina Macbook to test though, looks like something I could really use. I'll email you.
Filled out the survey too, same result. Really looking forward to your windows client being available! Thank you!
Frankly we didn't anticipate my calendar filling up so we added my co-founder Jake... his filled up so we added our intern Max... his filled up so we're finding someone new. Stay tuned, thx for the patience.
Re: Grain, a startup built atop of Zoom for note-taking and video-clip making
#79Looks like a crutch for poor managery practices which are very common in today's IT companies: management stubbornly wants to get rid of ancient technology of writing and to return to even earlier oral-only society.
As in oral-only societies, information becomes stored only in minds. After video meetings, no recorded information remains, so let's add recording of videos. Recorded videos are unsearchable and poorly seekable, so let's add voice recognition.
This is ridiculous: supporting desire of managers to return to prehistoric times and trying to fix it with frigging cutting-edge deep learning. I would not say "trusted by great teams".
Re: Grain, a startup built atop of Zoom for note-taking and video-clip making
#80Very cool stuff, two clarifying questions: - Does Grain require access to the Zoom API to work? (Is there some other screen capture / scraping at work?) Any known issues/restrictions with using this with enterprise Zoom accounts? - Can I record a Zoom meeting I was invited to, or just ones where I own the invite?
Great questions.
- Yes, the only way to log-into Grain is with your Zoom account. It's been really seamless, they did a great job setting up those permissions.
- Sort of. You can take notes if 1) It's your Zoom link or 2) It's someone on your team who is also a Grain user's Zoom link. There isn't currently a way to take notes across workspaces b/c we want the meeting host to be in control for privacy reasons.