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80 points pz | 2 comments | | HN request time: 0s | source

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. written-beyond ◴[] No.43186335[source]
Good luck guys! This maybe that I've usually been a part of smaller teams but the screenshots you guys provided are a little... overload-y.

Care to share what's the average size of your early adopters? Because it seems to be something great for larger teams but, then again I imagine the friction is greater for them too.

replies(1): >>43186544 #
2. pz ◴[] No.43186544[source]
This is good feedback, thanks. We packed a lot into the product so far and could have spent more time focusing the media assets to distill things better.

Early adopters range in size from 2 people to ~20. As you said, the Catch-22 for larger teams usually have established tool stacks so the (operational) switching cost is prohibitive.

FWIW we are a team of 5 and already find the feature set useful (we're biased, of course). I expect that ~5 is the threshold the organizational and search features become invaluable.