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

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81–90 of 120 posts

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

#81

Very cool. So needed. I will absolutely try your product. Your approach to "workflow" appears spot on. I love the template idea. I always insist on an agenda, minutes, wrap up (next steps). When I secretary for meetings, I create a shared doc, so others can help me live edit, proofread, etc. Having just watched the 2 min tour, maybe a future feature request. Ditto versioning. When minutes get sent out, there's always…

Thank you for the kind words! Btw, when you export your meeting notes to Notion for instance, we do add the date, meeting title & attendees emails :) We've also been thinking about being able to record 1min snippet audios but haven't prioritised it yet in the roadmap!

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

#82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sure the founders of Hera know this, but just so there's clear representation here on HN: as a Mac user, I would happily pay $100/year for anything that makes my meetings better. I'd pay more than $100/year. I'd pay $100/year for every person on my team. I don't care if it's an electron app, or 10 lines of Javascript: if it makes meetings better, I'm in.

You imply that you might, but are you actually planning on buying this? I'm curious because I see lots of people saying they would use something, but it doesn't always mean they will.

I'm sold on the concept and vision, I've installed it: if it does deliver value -- which I suspect it will -- I'll absolutely pay for it (I'd have to! I have more 4 meetings per week) and will advocate for it within my team. Meeting inefficiency costs my company thousands every month.

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

#83
post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 love the way you frame what streams are. And I would add that they basically help you be relevant in your meetings as you get access to the relevant context (= notes from past meetings in that stream). I also agree that we may have used a exotic joker with the name "Stream" when there was no need

Btw one thing I’ve been doing is keeping all notes with a person in a single document. It’s just easier to open up joesmith.txt instead of rooting around in the ten files (or searching across them) to find what I’m looking for. This approach is helpful when getting context on past meetings - I can skim notes from the most recent call instead of having to find and open the right file, then move back to the current one. Food for thought…

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

#84
post #78

Wow there sure are a lot of shills here. Oops, I mean growth hackers. Congrats on the totally genuine “launch.”

Whoa, you can't break the site guidelines like that. Please read the rules: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

I don't see evidence of shillage in this thread. Most of the users commenting about how they like/need the product haven't even voted for the submission. Also, they're well-established HN users with unrelated histories and (as far as I can tell) are coming from unrelated locations. Also, shills don't start Electron flamewars.

If you're worried about abuse, you should email hn@ycombinator.com with your concerns so we can investigate—we always look into it when people ask us to, and we tell YC founders doing Launch HNs to strictly avoid having friends/fans/users post booster comments.

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

#85
post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 love the way you frame what streams are. And I would add that they basically help you be relevant in your meetings as you get access to the relevant context (= notes from past meetings in that stream). I also agree that we may have used a exotic joker with the name "Stream" when there was no need

"Context" or "Topic" might be a better name that conveys the use. "Tag" is technical and I always fail to use tags because I don't think of how I'll be helped by them in the future.

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

#86
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…

> you're not the market

I think it's a bit too easy to use this to justify whatever decision you make. After all, you can always define your market to be whatever set of people like your product and are willing to put up with whatever set of restrictions is imposed.

That isn't to say that this is never a valid point to make, for example I think "if you don't see the point of this, you're not the market" is absolutely reasonable. I can also accept it when talking about the price.

However, I don't see how it applies to the Operating System restriction and to a lesser extent the complaints about Electron. My primary machines from work run Windows, but that doesn't say anything about the number of meetings I have, how much I prepare for them or what value this application has to me.

I see potential for this to be quite useful and would have no qualms paying the subscription fee if it turns out to save me time over my current workflow. I think that makes me part of the market for the tool. But I probably won't find out if it's useful or pay for it anytime soon because the application doesn't run on my machine. I can see many colleagues being in a similar boat.

If not fulfilling the system requirements automatically makes me "not the market" and you're happy doing your business constrained to "the market", then you're obviously allowed to do that. The authors, and hardly anyone else for that matter, owes me a Windows app or any other product. But I don't think saying "I'd use this, but I don't use macOS" is naysaying or implies "you can never build a successful business" if done respectfully. It enables the creators to gauge interest and decide whether to invest resources into opening up another segment of potential users.

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

#87
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.

I would +1 the ability to store my notes locally, with an optional sync to Google Docs or even your own server

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

#88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm wondering if "tag" or "label" is not more common knowledge?

I would also think you can 'tag' something with multiple labels/tags. Meeting X might be 'onboarding','sales','q4', findable by any of those tags. If it's in a 'stream' called 'onboarding'... that feels like something that is siloed away. Something wouldn't naturally be in 5 streams, but could naturally have 5 tags.

We'll want meetings to be in multiple streams at some point so it's likely that we go with tags!

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

#89

You're entering a pretty crowded market. Have you taken a look at Fellow? https://fellow.app/ Just trying to figure out what makes this product better than the hundreds out there.

Yes, Fellow is one of the first company to build a meeting-centric solution! Few significant differences: - Hera is very single-player, our product is built around making YOU more productive with your meetings - There is a strong focus on automation. Let's say you use a template for one occurence of a weekly meeting, Hera will suggest you to create a rule to do that automatically for all the future occurrences. - A o…

I used Fellow briefly, but it was so incredibly slow. Glad to hear you are putting a big focus on performance! Submitted myself to the beta.

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

#90
post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I would +1 the ability to store my notes locally, with an optional sync to Google Docs or even your own server

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