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80 points pz | 6 comments | | HN request time: 1.362s | source | bottom

Hi HN, I’m Phil, one of the co-founders building emdash. Previously, I was an early engineer at Facebook and led Customer Products at Square.

We’ve focused on making chat and video work together so distributed teams can stay aligned without drowning in information. You can try it here: https://emdash.io.

It frustrated us how easily important conversations would happen and then disappear. Slack never quite matched how we worked. Channels were too coarse which led to noisy notifications and broken search. Zoom meetings weren’t much better–unless someone took perfect notes (which rarely happened), video calls became black holes of lost knowledge.

We spent too much time trying to find the information we needed to do our jobs.

To address this, we’re testing a few concepts and would appreciate your feedback on the value of the following:

(1) Automatically record, summarize, and transcribe your team’s video chats. We store meeting content directly inside discussions to facilitate search and discovery.

(2) Make it easy to manage & organize conversations of varying scope. A chat between team members can be forked into a dedicated Discussion with its own audience permissions and subscription. Individual messages or entire Discussions can be moved after the fact. Conversations can evolve unpredictably, so having the right tools to keep them organized post-hoc was important to us.

(3) Improve search with AI and hierarchical information retrieval. We use LLMs to uncover insights, summarize content, and connect the dots across related discussions, meetings, and documents. You can ask questions like “What are the team’s priorities this week?” or “What did we decide to do with feature X?” and get back a generative response AND deep links into the original chats and meetings.

Try it out: https://emdash.io and tell us what you think!

1. clacker-o-matic ◴[] No.43185178[source]
One note I have about your pricing page is that you don't explain what a startup or small to midsize team actually is. I would also much rather have a set pricing scheme immediately with a 60-90 day trial period similar to how slack works.
replies(1): >>43185467 #
2. fred_h ◴[] No.43185467[source]
Hi, Fred here – I’m one of the founding team members. Thanks for the comment.

First, to the question about team sizes. We view "Startups" as generally teams with <25 users, followed by small/mid-sized "Growth" companies that have <250 employees. Beyond that, we anticipate most companies falling into the "Scale" category. That said, this could all be revised based on usage data and I will also update our website later today to reflect the above.

Regarding pricing, we haven’t finalized it yet because we’ve prioritized understanding how teams actually use emdash—what works, what doesn’t, and where we should focus.

Pricing is important, and we want to get it right. Typical usage patterns, evolving AI and cloud/infra costs, and where we fit competitively in the market are all variables we still need to explore. We’ll need to strike the right balance and be competitive enough with vis-a-vis the market.

It would be smart to start with a free trial before transitioning users to a paid plan. We’re still figuring out whether that should be time-based (e.g., 60-90 days), usage-based (e.g., after your 20th video meeting).

I get it – no one likes unexpected pricing shifts and when the time comes, we will be transparent about our thinking and communicate changes well in advance. Our goal is to build something sustainable, not just for us, but for the teams that rely on emdash. Hope this helps clarify.

replies(1): >>43191736 #
3. rsyring ◴[] No.43191736[source]
"We haven't figured out pricing" sounds like a big turnoff for anyone seriously considering this who wants self service.

Just pick something that's a no brainier for people to try, change it later if you have to. Your biggest risk right now is people walk without giving the product real consideration. Lack of clarity on pricing will do that for a lot of people, even though you are offering a free trial.

replies(1): >>43192003 #
4. pz ◴[] No.43192003{3}[source]
Thanks for the advice. One challenge for us will be how to price-in token based costs, e.g. downstream GPT services. There was an interesting post earlier today on HN related to this https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43186032 which recommended progressive pricing, which I thought was really interesting. On the other hand, the marginal cost of these services is being aggressively driven down by the big players so it may ultimately be safe to provide a fixed cost subscription model.
replies(1): >>43195686 #
5. financetechbro ◴[] No.43195686{4}[source]
Have you thought about carving out the token expense? I.e. giving users the option of using their own api key vs you being the middle man for that expense?
replies(1): >>43197101 #
6. pz ◴[] No.43197101{5}[source]
Yes, we've discussed that, it makes sense IMO