We all hate sitting in long, unnecessary meetings. Replace all these unnecessary meetings with async meetings! Use your voice and video to communicate effortlessly, on your time. Forget about syncing timezones and instead collaborate with your team seamlessly.
Hello ProductHunt! 👋
I’m super excited to finally launch Minutes today, we’ve been working on it for quite some time with a lot of changes over the last couple of months.
But let me start with a rundown of how we got here:
A few years ago, I was a developer in a remote team, and often had to sit on late-night meetings at 2 or 3AM to fix a thing here or debug something there, because my teammates were in different timezones. I couldn’t help but think if there was a better way to get work done without having to be in these meetings at all.
Over time, I gathered up plenty of reasonable arguments to why sync meetings can slow down productivity massively: be it back-to-back meetings, interruptive meetings, late-night calls, or what have you. My co-founder has a similar experience with sync meetings as well, and we sat together and started ideating on the best way to bring async communication to remote teams!
We started off with a platform to share 1:1 voice and video messages, we did a round of beta testing with it as well, and learned a lot. Then we narrowed things down further, and decided to focus on transitioning sync meetings to async!
From start to today, our vision has always earmarked to “helping people make their work revolve around their lives than their lives revolving around their work”. And by this, we want people to pick the place they want to live in, pick the hours they’re comfortable working with, and let their work adapt to this. Instead of having to shift somewhere else for work, or having to work during hours where you’d rather to be doing something else. And we believe Minutes is a step in the right direction for this vision.
We’ve designed Minutes to be simple and straightforward, so that you can start making your meetings async effortlessly! Do give it a try, and ask us any questions you have, we’ll be active here all day! 🙌
@yanchummar I will try this once it's available for Android. In order to help you guys succeed, please check out volley if possible since there may not be a lot of info online. They raised $6 million dollars, created an awesome async messaging product, but after 2 years of pivoting they never found product Market fit in terms of a profitable business model. They had lots of users , I think around 30,000 and growing , but It turns out that most people still preferred to use text over audio and video to communicate. They were not able to find a viable business model around async audio and video, but hopefully you guys can learn from their mistakes to be profitable!
Thanks for sharing this, @robandersenshow! And that's super unfortunate for Volley :(
We've designed Minutes to be very easy to adopt to an existing remote workflow. As any quick and big transition is often difficult and unlikely. Our goal with Minutes is to make communication async for teams, and we're willing to try out different approaches to get there effectively.
We hope to pick up things from Volley's story and do things differently to get async to more remote teams! 🙌
Cool, but… 6$/month for something that's essential equivalent to creating group chats, sending voice and video messages, and then archiving the group chats (in existing tools that you're already paying for)? ^^;
@anna_0x That is a totally fair question!
While existing tools can help you to create group chats, send messages and archive them. They're not purpose designed for async workflows or async meetings for that matter. We're trying to enable an async workflow that does not include text, doesn't interrupt your work (stays in the menubar), and focuses on purely one purpose: creating and closing meetings.
Before building Minutes, my cofounder and I had tried plenty of existing tools with voice and video to work async, and they can get the job done if you can put in the extra effort to keep things tidy, we've found that we can do the same atleast ten times better with Minutes!
Hope this answers your question, we'd love for you to try out the product on the free plan and see if you change your mind, we'll be happy to hear why if it doesn't! 🙌
@yanchummar I hear you and I have not tried the product yet. It’d just be crazy hard to get sign in from my company for something that’s relatively expensive considering that, as you said, with some extra effort, we can already do the same thing. I'm all for paying to save effort, but it's still hard to justify the *per user* pricing. If I want to be able to have these “meetings” with 20 colleagues, that’s 120$ per month, on top of whatever we're already paying for enterprise chat software. And of those 20 colleagues, I might be mostly talking with 2, but I need the other 18 to be available for infrequent chats.
My experience was nothing short of amazing and thoroughly impressed with the product's value proposition. This product will prove to be an invaluable asset for remote teams.
Just what I was looking for. Async meetings have worked better for us in the past. We reduced meeting time by 40% on average... now we have the tool to not do it manually (: Congrats to the team
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