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.
Since you built your product based on another vendor's platform, are you concerned that they might cut off access? Do you have any contingency plans for that?
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.
Twitter used to say the same stuff and they cut their dev community off at the knees once they got big enough (mostly because of said community building out their feature set).
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.
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?
We bounced around on really bad names like Radical (as in transparency/candor), Arthur (everyone has a seat at the roundtable), Zebra (literally just a placeholder)...
But landed on Grain because it means something about our product. Grains are little pieces that can accumulate to become something meaningful. Thats what our video highlight clips are all about. Little nuggets that come from somewhere else but can stand on their own. We get most excited when thinking about what can be made when you combine the "grains" together.
Also easy to say, a real word, 5 letters and the .co was cheap and nobody else has claimed the mindshare around the word. Today we start working on our SEO game :)
Hey! this is Jake, Mike's co-founder. We don't currently have a windows app and only support Zoom users. If that's you, you can email me: jake [at] grain [dot] co
If not, we will be working on building out support for windows /linux in coming months [we use electron] as well as other VC providers.
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.
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.
I think this product is way overdue for how ubiquitous video has become, even pre-social distancing. Scrubbing through lengths of video to find the relevant clip is such a pain.
I'm digging the integration features, e.g. slack, imessage
I feel like this is one of those tools that will end up being used in ways not initially planned. Meme generation and reaction videos perhaps, lol.
We actually spent 9 months building a prior version of Grain that was basically a Google Doc w/ Zoom integration & time stamps. Ultimately, we threw that version away (kill your darlings as they say). People told us that what you described was the bigger problem b/c it was too much work to unlock a stream of recorded video w/ traditional post-hoc video editing tools.
But if it's easy enough to break the best content down into just the good parts that live on their own, independent of the parent recording file... well that unlocks some interesting things you can do to combine those blocks and share them in feeds w/ teams.
But it all comes down the the quality of the content you make with the tool. So that's where we're focused first.
We use Notion like crazy internally so it was at the top of our priority list along with Slack. I probably paste 80% of my links into Slack... it's magical b/c people just watch, get the context and then discuss... I hate information dumping and Grain + Slack saves me tons of time to share video highlights instead and they work better anyway b/c it preserves the context and richness of the original video (with voice, tone, facial expressions, screenshare content, etc.). All of those get lost when trying to summarize a video call to info transfer to someone else.
I find myself pasting Grain highlights in Notion when I'm doing more analytical work that I want to be supported by rich media/evidence and become a source of reference/documentation. Think highlight reels.
Can confirm the "new way of working" when it comes to video clips ...
I have made it a part of my worklife to share with co-workers EDITED video highlights of zoom calls and training sessions.
This includes conference talks I find on youtube (e.g. Kubecon talks) that I want to have colleagues view.
I can usually cut down an hour talk/call. to around 5-20 minutes of good high impact content.
Historically, I just record in the cloud on Zoom (using all the nice extra features around auto-transcript, recording speaker and shared screen separately, etc... ) and edit it in Adobe Premier.
I've got the manual workflow down where this is something I don't do every day.. but several times a week is fine. Editing ain't pretty, but it is effective.
Since the lockdown, I have been working on the other end of the "pipeline"... the INPUT to Zoom. After a couple of false starts (OBS, CamTwist, Wirecast...). I ended up implementing Ecamm Studio Pro....
Can you talk about the value you've gotten out of doing this? It sounds very interesting, but also fairly effort-intensive. Does it also help you remember meeting takeaways, because you're actively reviewing your recent day or two?
I do it mostly so I don't have to repeat myself. :)
I use the clips so that others can gain from the kernals of wisdom those clips provide... without having to commit to some portion of an hour to find the kernal themselves.
Saves everyone time and enforces compliance to decisions made )
Also, of course, by manually editing down a deeply technical discussion from an hour to 20 minutes helps me REALLY listen and understand what the speaker is saying....and so it also helps me to continue improve my knowledge...
I've got to say, that for meetings big/important enough where you've got someone dedicated to taking notes/minutes, this seems like it could be a really effective and compelling way of sharing meeting highlights/takeaways/fun bits with a broader audience, people who couldn't make it, or for posterity. A serious win for workplace culture and communication generally. (Of course, you never know until you actually try using it for a few weeks.)
But if this works well, hopefully Zoom buys them, and we'll expect to see Google and Microsoft build their own versions.
Thanks, the video took a surprising amount of work but happy w/ the result.
You're exactly right wrt the dedicated real-time annotator. We created a information transfer framework for our internal product development/design that has helped us to see that for our product to work (highlight clips that don't suck)... you need a dedicated person who's job it is to annotate the content of the video stream in real time (aka taking notes). It's too complex to do well with AI... let the humans drive the car for a while if you know what I mean :)
Our core use cases so far have focused on where this dedicated notetaker is already the case and over time we can automate the annotation process and expand to more use cases without a dedicated notetaker.
The cool thing we've seen since releasing the ability to take collaborative notes w/ your team is that the annotating just kinda happens naturally... people jot down things they thing are important to the mutual benefit of everyone on the team (in the meeting and not).
Our transcription will naturally get better over time but it doesn't have to be perfect b/c it's a means to an end in Grain. (creating/trimming video clips)
Even perfect transcripts are still terrible to read most of the time b/c the dynamic nature of spoken dialogue just doesn't translate well across mediums.
Google "Media Richness Theory" if you want to go down the rabbit hole on this.
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.
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.
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?
I have had exactly the same experience in my previous (and in my current) startup. I would never add the logo of a client without their consent. (maybe some don't follow that logic)
Is this a feature or a product? How about 9 months from now? There is a genuine concern with startups built "atop of" another product. There is a thin line between alive and dead in that space. Twitter devs can tell you a thing or two about it.
Hopefully this is a catapult or an entry point. All the best, regardless.
Thanks for the well wishes skeptical but kind stranger!
No doubt we're aware of the analogs and risks. Have spent a collective month in Zoom calls with other platform founders to understand the risks but feeling really good about Zoom as a GTM platform partner. Have mentioned in other threads but there's long-sequence of strategic moves at play and this is the first of them.
This post inspired me to repost [1] my side project that I open sourced as a PoC a while ago. I saw "note-taking" in the title and my project allows the type of note-taking that I envision should happen a bit more often (using a stylus).
The code is open-source, so I invite the co-founders of Grain to take a look and see if the idea might be useful to them :)
Looks 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".
I've been building apps on Zoom for 5 years (3 years building private apps for Zoom based schools) and I'm grateful for the recent news helping Zoom to prioritize critical things that Eric said himself that they should have prioritized a long time ago.
The concerns are 100% valid, I'm glad to see them finally surfaced and addressed. I still like our odds w/ Zoom relative to WebRTC, their team is a proven mammoth. My son was on a Zoom call for school this morning... likely some PR relativity of the past week.
It's a two horse race at this point Zoom or WebRTC. Most start ups choose to build on WebRTC and focus on new workflows, we chose to build on Zoom to add the most meaningful leverage we could think of (data utility) to existing workflows.
I was building something with a very similar same feature set (minus the sharing publicly) for the last few weeks to add as a feature to my platform, just less polished as befits a 1 person team with no funding :D.
There are a lot of things to be done to improve the utility of videoconferences once finished. The information is obviously less dense and parseable but also more rich. It's inspiring to see other projects working in the same direction
Good luck! I was wondering what backend do you guys use for Speech-to-text? As a ML guy I'm quite interested to learn what people experiment with. Cheers:)
Hi Mike, What particular advantages do you see between grain clips vs written minutes from a meeting?
In my field there are many instances where an item on the agenda is talked through for 15mins and the minute-taker can summarise into a couple of lines/paragraph.
I'm struggling to see how a video clip can deliver a similar summarisation, unless someone has vocally summarised at the end for the clip.
Frankly this wouldn't make for a great highlight clip. You could make it but nobody would watch it.
Grain is best for that punchy quote you want to share mid-moment or for the summary 30 second wrap-up at the end.
We have changed our dialogue to include these at the end of convos b/c that way it's easy to summarize conclusions and next steps to document and share with others. Most good meetings have these anyway.
- 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?
- 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.
Hi Mike, What particular advantages do you see between grain clips vs written minutes from a meeting?
In my field there are many instances where an item on the agenda is talked through for 15mins and the minute-taker can summarise into a couple of lines/paragraph.
Great stuff! I'm a ML researcher / engineer in NLP, and I'm curious what sort of speech recognition tools you guys are using? I'm thinking of building really solid SDK's in this space:)
Like anything in start-ups it's a calculated risk. Zoom's app marketplace is designed to facilitate start-ups like ours as they move to become a platform. See https://marketplace.zoom.us/competition. One of the partners behind it told me they had 600 applications so at the very least there are dozens of us! Dozens!
Zoom is just where we start (huge distribution channel and the most developed platform). As soon as you build your own WebRTC based thing... you're nuking millions of existing video based workflows you could otherwise tap into to create value. There are several 2-3 year older than us companies that are doing quite well hooking into the data generated from all the VC platforms without providing the VC service themselves.
But yes, this was def the #1 objection of VCs when we raised our seed round. Fortunately we got others to believe that the first move we just launched is just one of many in a strategy sequence. Time will tell.
Doesn't everything start out like that?
How would you define a feature vs. a product? Could an app like Zoom be considered a feature of an OS because of its dependency of the host system to act?
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.