
Show HN: Meetter – Reduce time wasted by meetings - genevpd
Hey, HN!<p>This post is not about useless meeting tips, nor about some new tool that drains remaining calendar hours.<p>Like most of us, I’m very frustrated by the amount of time wasted by meetings. Why most of us here hate meetings is well described in PG’s essay: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.paulgraham.com&#x2F;makersschedule.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.paulgraham.com&#x2F;makersschedule.html</a><p>There is also a great solution that worked for YC: office hours. Ok, but how can this help a regular maker in a regular company?<p>Most makers struggle with the meetings scheduled by their colleagues, so let’s focus just on the company internal meetings.<p>What if every maker will have her&#x2F;his own office hours few times a week at different times? Yeah, that probably won’t work. Makers &amp; managers often need to meet in 2+ groups...<p>OK, what if all makers within the company will have office hours at the same time? Would be nice, but that won’t scale as it will require too many conference rooms and switching rooms fast enough may not be possible if someone has six 10min meetings with different folks…<p>Oh, wait, but what about video meetings? There is no room limit there and switching rooms takes seconds. Many of us work in distributed companies with a lot of meetings online already. Great, but there is still a problem with agreeing on times and booking small meetings within those hours. Also, what to do if there is urgent discussion and everything is overbooked ahead of time with non-urgent managerial stuff?<p>OK, so that is what we are trying to solve with <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.Meetter.ai" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.Meetter.ai</a> and would love to hear what you think about the early version. Please check How Meetter Works section on the landing page for more details.<p>Here is an open demo account just for HN: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;hn.meetter.ai&#x2F;signup-demo" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;hn.meetter.ai&#x2F;signup-demo</a> After sign-up, just try to post few agenda topics with random people and see if you can join office hours scheduled Tue&#x2F;Wed&#x2F;Thu at 8 AM PT.
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jarl-ragnar
I have a much simpler way of dealing with meetings. If I'm sent a meeting
request and there's no agenda or clear reason for my attendance I decline it.

A couple of months doing that in a new job, explaining the rational where
necessary, usually sorts the problem out.

~~~
snarf21
This is the crux of the problem. Is there an agenda that leads to a concrete
result and is it the right set of participants? Too often, people turn a 10
minute meeting into an hour by just socializing or talking about things that
only 2 people in the 10 care about or need to know. This is what annoys me
about Slack's "we remove all meetings and email" approach. You can have no
full meetings using Slack, instead you invite everyone to a channel and have
100 micro-meetings of a minute all day long that constantly interrupt your
flow and could be solved easily with one short 15 minute meeting.

The problem is lack of good communication skills. Whether it is inability to
write concise emails that have clear actionable tasks or resolution or having
agenda for meetings and someone who will force the meeting forward. The other
thing that drives this is managers (project, product, technical) who feel they
must know _everything_ about _everything_ related to the project. Lack of
clear roles and job descriptions exacerbates this issue and you end up with a
lot of people only interested in job preservation.

~~~
genevpd
> This is what annoys me about Slack's "we remove all meetings and email"
> approach. You can have no full meetings using Slack, instead you invite
> everyone to a channel and have 100 micro-meetings of a minute all day long
> that constantly interrupt your flow and could be solved easily with one
> short 15 minute meeting.

Unlike the slack approach, with Meetter micro meetings are clustered inside
predefined hours during the day to avoid distraction. You can set it as the
last hour at the end of the work day and get 7 hours of no distraction. Also,
if there are multiple topics with the same group of people - these will be
merged into one within that hour, say if for some reason you have six five
minutes long topics with other two people - you will get one productive thirty
minutes to talk.

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lsiebert
I'll be honest, many of the issues I've seen with meetings are issues with not
training people how to have productive meetings, not having it clear who can
make decisions, and perverse incentives.

Not to mention almost every woman I know in tech has told me a story where
they are ignored, only to have someone else who's a guy propose basically the
same idea (including having had male coworkers who are friends knowingly
propose the exact same idea as an experiment) and have it accepted and
praised.

If you think of how much time you spend in meetings, some sort of meeting
instruction/meeting consultant might just pay for itself in increased
productivity.

I am not a meeting consultant or a manager, but using robert's rules of order
in a hobby community made me much better at meetings.

Simple ideas like having the problem clearly stated, asking for proposed
solutions, debating them by going back and forth from opposed to in support so
that it's clear when the minority has all been heard from without having
everyone have to put in 2 cents, only including actual stakeholders etc.

Anyway that's not to distract from this effort, this seems like a great
solution to any scheduling problems if nobody is in an open office.

Of course video calls work best when everyone has private office space without
an open plan.

~~~
dionian
> I'll be honest, many of the issues I've seen with meetings are issues with
> not training people how to have productive meetings, not having it clear who
> can make decisions, and perverse incentives.

I agree with this, a lot of this is human error and inefficiency and tendency
to fill spaces

> Not to mention almost every woman I know in tech has told me a story where
> they are ignored, only to have someone else who's a guy propose basically
> the same idea (including having had male coworkers who are friends knowingly
> propose the exact same idea as an experiment) and have it accepted and
> praised.

Not to take away from the good point of gender discrimination, but this
happens a lot of guys too. It's a cut-throat world...

~~~
lsiebert
I'm not sure why you raised your point, but unfortunately generalizing when a
specific issue is raised is one of the problem things I see in meetings too.

Like if someone says, "The front end is extremely slow loading the SPA in the
browser because of legacy cruft," I see a lot of people relate that to their
area or generalize, either "Analytics also takes forever, the email queue
needs more workers/the db has slow queries, building the app takes too long,
the mobile app take forever to sign in" etc etc, or "the whole tech stack is
slow and needs improvement."

No doubt all true, and sure perhaps speeding up DB queries by indexing on user
email or whatever would speed up loading for signed in people, but the front
end is still slow to load, and bringing up other issues doesn't solve the
specific problem raised, if you get my point.

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genevpd
Note: Meetter has built-in video meeting experience with recording &
transcribe by default. You will see ‘Join Now’ button on the agenda about 5
minutes before the Meetter hour starts.

If you would like to try it with your team in your own Meetter account with
own hours schedule, just email the name of the organization to <my first
name>@meetter.ai or simply sign-up from the landing page. I promise to respond
with new account URL quickly.

Appreciate any feedback! Gene Podolyak

~~~
zamalek
This is a really unique solution; nice work. Do you have any thoughts on how
this would work across timezones (our team is spread across 9 hours)?

~~~
genevpd
Thanks for the feedback! If you have at least one hour of overlap - then you
can just use that daily hour for Meetter. That is what we do within our team.

If that is a bit more complicated like: US, Europe & Australia. You may need
to setup hours on 3 different intersections and people can decline those that
don’t work for them and Meetter will use that information for scheduling.

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system2
Company meetings are not about the tech or tools you can throw at them. It is
about the culture. Some companies understand that and minimize their meetings
and solely depend on project management systems.

Unless you can find a tool to make these people understand the culture has a
problem (also the hierarchy), I don't think any new tool can help.

Note: Basecamp, zoho and all others promise similar tools. You might want to
change the intro video, maybe invest in voice-over with basic demo.

~~~
genevpd
Thanks for your suggestion on landing page!

The problem we see is that companies in their transition from physical office
to a virtual and distributed workplace carried over all the meeting habits
that are outdated.

We believe there is no longer need in standing meetings with fixed audiences.

With Meetter, you are basically setting your weekly meetings budget for the
whole company and let topics compete for that time. This is a lot different
from what is happening today: meetings fight for all the available time on
everyone's calendar.

Meetter hours are not finalized until 15 minutes before the start. High
priority, smaller and shorter topics win. Meetter makes all meetings about
what they should be: about solving problems, not about socializing & sharing
updates - there are less expensive ways to do that.

Can tool change the culture? We are optimists and believe they can.

~~~
system2
Have you experienced these yourself or seen it from outside (like a tech
consultant)?

~~~
genevpd
Yes, I have personally struggled a lot. About 5+ years of experience working
in a highly distributed company where meetings for me and many colleagues take
more than 50% of the time. There a lot of advice out there on how to improve
things, but it takes time to master. The other problem is that it is not
something that only you need to learn, all your peers have to and that takes
time. There are also limits to what you can do with existing technology.

Compare the difficulty of doing project task tracking in MS Word versus
JIRA/Trello/Basecamp.

With meetings, we are still at MS Word stage and Meetter is a JIRA/Trello for
meetings.

~~~
system2
Well then, you should include a case study like yours because it would be far
more effective than a short video.

~~~
genevpd
Thanks for the suggestion!

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peterwwillis
Feature request for way, way down the line: auto-integrating product work into
daily/weekly standup meeting invites.

If I have committed something, updated a ticket, run a deployment, resolved a
pagerduty issue, moved a work task from Planning to Doing, etc, then automate
retrieving this work log and pre-populate it in the meeting invite. All
members of the meeting can see the work and can ask about it if they need to.
The individual then doesn't need to state what work they did, but only mention
their blockers.

I believe this would benefit virtually any group with a stand-up meeting. It's
a lot of integration work, though. Might already exist, I'm not sure.

~~~
genevpd
Thanks for bringing this up! One thing that we are not yet sure how much value
the concept of daily/weekly standing meetings will add to the teams using
Meetter for most of their meetings.

I feel like many meeting habits and practices are evolved from the physical
office environment that has limitations that are not present in the virtual
world.

Btw, check out this talk from Al Pittampali at Google
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mn-q529ExFw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mn-q529ExFw)
One of the keystone habits he is advocating is "Make all standing meetings
tentative"

~~~
peterwwillis
Oh I agree, but we do need to discuss blockers relatively quickly after they
come up, and stand-ups can be an efficient way to do this. You can try to just
automate workflows or try to get people to resolve blockers asynchronously,
but if it takes more than a couple replies to resolve them, now a meeting may
have been faster/more efficient.

If I'm using Meetter to automatically schedule a stand-up, I (presumably) can
say, only schedule the meeting if we have blockers to discuss, and only invite
the people who are mentioned in the issue/blocker. But how to determine if
there's blockers, and who to invite? Query the issue tracker.

You could look up blocked GitHub or ZenHub Issues and generate a stand-up to
discuss them once they happen, and maybe re-generate a stand-up after X time
if they have not been updated, to prevent stale blockers.

What I get out of this is when I work for a company which requires stand-ups,
I don't have to go to them if I have no blockers. I know I would pay for that
privilege :-)

~~~
genevpd
Ah, I see what you are suggesting. This indeed makes sense and may be possible
not so far down the road when we expose APIs.

For now, it is possible to implement the same workflow with the current
version of Meetter just by asking someone to check task tracker for blockers
about 30 minutes before the Meetter hour and manually create topics.

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WorldMaker
Interesting. I have a bunch of private notes on the subject from when I was
last playing with startup ideas. The biggest hurdle I kept hitting was
differentiating the startup within the calendar space, because it is a pretty
well saturated space with a lot of entrenched players. (Similarly as bad as
the Mail space, if not worse, just as we've seen several apps exit these past
couple of weeks. Though some of those efforts have exited well for the startup
founders, so that's an issue more for the overly conservative "local" VCs I
was curious if I could get to invest, when I was putting my notes together…)

The partial pivot to automating web meetings is a neat idea, but the immediate
concern I would see there is that now you're fighting _two_ fairly heavily
entrenched spaces, calendars and web meetings. Twice the battle fronts might
mean twice the opportunities to exit, but it also might mean twice the
opportunities to be out-competed/exhausted?

~~~
genevpd
This is so true. Looking at recent developments in calendar software - it is
almost all about generating more meetings easier, and not much about
protecting from the distraction. Meeting software companies - pricing models
tiered based on duration and size of the meetings. So it will require 180
degree u-turn for them to catch up.

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sqs
Neat! I’ve wanted something like this to use at Sourcegraph. We would like to
be able to say “Alice and Bob, you two should chat about XYZ for 15 min
sometime in the next week” and have some piece of software aggregate and
schedule all those things. How much of that can Meetter do?

~~~
genevpd
Great suggestion! We never thought about such a use case so as of now by
default you will be also added to that meeting, but we can easily tweak it.

So Meetter can do alomost everything you described. I will let you know when
we have tweaked it.

~~~
sqs
Looking forward to it!

~~~
genevpd
Give it a try:
[https://i.gyazo.com/d848d0bcdedcb4046b644613efbc95ed.gif](https://i.gyazo.com/d848d0bcdedcb4046b644613efbc95ed.gif)

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genevpd
Hi All,

I'd like to thank everyone for the feedback and for trying meetter this week.

We will be closing demo account this week. You are still more than welcome to
sign-up for early access here:
[https://www.Meetter.ai](https://www.Meetter.ai)

Good luck!

Gene

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vernie
Is the name an abbreviation of Meet-eater?

~~~
genevpd
Love it! :-)

