
Show HN: Opp.io – Meeting Minutes Made Useful - bujatt
http://www.opp.io/
======
kenshi
I think the demo on the landing page should be in the form of meeting minutes,
rather than someone messaging a load of tasks to their (I assume) direct
reports.

Why? Because the feeling the demo evoked for me was: "Uh oh. This looks like a
micro-managers wet dream".

So rather than just have "@John please !phone client" perhaps the demo would
itemise the meeting minutes with: "@John said he would !phone client and
discuss requirements".

Perhaps this is simply because I have had the unpleasant experience of working
for panic-driven micromanagers before. But I think you really want to make
sure your landing page is resonating with "Awesome - this is going to make my
life easier" vs. "What pandora's box of hell will this tool unleash in my
organization and work life".

Product definitely looks useful though, and the above comments are about
making sure you present it in its best light. Good luck!

~~~
rurounijones
Agrees, I would definitely change the examples on the site so that they do not
use the imperative form.

It kind of distracts, I have never seen meeting minutes written like that.

~~~
bujatt
Hi rurounijones, you're right in pointing out the important difference between
imperative vs. descriptive form. In our application we intend to accommodate
both - hence the inline syntax within the free text.

So you could write in a very succinct way "@John please !phone client" like
when you drop over a quick note on Post-It to your colleague-friend sitting
next table. But you could also send as a more polite request, something like
"@john, can you be so kind to !phone the client". Or what you just wrote
"@John said he would !phone client and discuss requirements". These all refer
to the same action: John should phone the client.

P.S. In the video we were of course limited by keeping the text as short as
possible so it remains legible.

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steven777400
The landing page is fantastic. I know exactly what this product does, and I
can see where it would fit into our organizational needs, all without any
effort on my part (I didn't even need to scroll, although there is more detail
when I did).

~~~
humpt
The product is sure awesome, but since you're discussing the design of the
homepage, I think the typography might need some more work. And if you look on
[this page]([http://www.opp.io/About](http://www.opp.io/About)), the color
palette as well :/

~~~
bujatt
Hi Humpt, thanks for the comment. We will definitely iterate on the design
including typography, colours in the mockup, color/whitespace balance etc. For
now, most important to us is that people get the concept of the product.

------
taprun
I get the feeling that this product would be really good for people who are
moving about quite a bit - delivery folks, plumbers, surveyors, etc. Are you
going to call out specific types of people who would be best served by this?

Also, minor grammatical nitpick: "LESS MESSAGES" should probably be "FEWER
MESSAGES".

~~~
bujatt
Hey taprun, thanks for spotting the typo. We tried to adapt the popular quote
"LESS IS MORE", popularized by Mies van der Rohe, to the given context. Any
idea how to say this? "LESS MESSAGING IS MORE" (sorry for the capitals)

Regarding your question about our target user segment. Currently we target
coordinators, project managers and workteams but haven't identified yet a more
narrow segment within that.

------
mbesto
Sorry to be that guy, but this clearly doesn't follow the Show HN guidelines:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html)

"If your work isn't ready for people to try out yet, please don't put "Show
HN" in the title. Once it's ready, come back and share it then.

For example, blog posts, _email signups_ , and fundraisers can't be tried out,
so they don't count as Show HNs."

~~~
bujatt
Hi mbesto, I have to admit you are right. I was simply too excited to share
the landing page.

Actually you can try it out [http://opp.io/app](http://opp.io/app) but there
is no direct link to it from the front page. (It is less functional than in
the demo video.)

~~~
mbesto
No worries - looks really cool nevertheless. Looking forward to see how it
progresses.

------
bujatt
Hey, I am one of the guys behind this. Would love to hear your feedback on the
landing page of our upcoming beta.

~~~
FlyingAvatar
I am really excited that you are working on this. I began working on an app
extremely similar to this (down to the Twitter/IRC like notation) due to my
own frustration with the inefficiency of taking meeting notes. I never
finished the prototype, but I'll share my ideas that I felt were important:

* Make integration with outside parties easy (i.e. Don't force everyone in the meeting to use the app to get the benefits.) Allow me to add aliases to meeting member's e-mail addresses (i.e. @joe = joe@example.com) Allow me to e-mail a link to the minutes when the meeting is over to all parties.

* Scheduling

I should be able to send calendar invites to participants of previous meetings
/ define recurring meetings. If I open up the app it should know what meeting
I am in by my schedule.

* Continuity

Many of my meetings are recurring meetings. At today's meeting, I want to
review the open/closed items from the previous meeting. Though I still want a
way to delineate what happened in today's meeting.

* Self-hostable option

For legal / contractual / paranoia reasons, I may need to keep my data in-
house. For several of the groups in my company, a cloud-hosted app is a deal
breaker.

* Plugins

I should be able to integrate the user directory with my company's LDAP
server. I should be able to promote tasks to real tickets in my project
management software. I should be able to reference items from other meetings.

Anyway, good luck with your app!

~~~
bujatt
Thanks sharing your ideas, FlyingAvatar.

I comment on some of them: \- Emailing will be automatic, people receive the
memo via email and also access the full document via a link. \- We thought on
importing last week's items, and have options to bulk hide the items done etc.
\- Data privacy is definitely a concern of organizations, especially larger
ones. That's a hard nut to crack.

------
ams6110
You say meeting minutes made useful but the header on the website is "Succinct
Team Messaging." I actually didn't see anything that looked like meeting
minutes presented anywhere.

Was hoping this would take minutes from Word as 95% of secretaries will use,
somehow extract action items, and then help communicate/track them.

Everything shown here I would just use email to manange. It's not outdated, it
works and it's an LCD. I run a small nonprofit organization and was hoping
this might be helpful because action item followup is a pain point. But I
wouldn't use this.

~~~
pi-err
Agreed. The demo is a top-down management wet dream. A meeting where people
get instructed in details to do specific tasks? No deadline, no ambiguity?
Those guys never attended a meeting.

UX wise, I'm not ok with the "red/orange/green" codes and "fail/done" tags.
Even for a small startup, communication is not that blunt, for a reason. Red
in the demo seems to stand for postponed, canceled, rejected or badly
executed. Yet "red" means bad in most cultural contexts. The color code
implies too much and would really harm any group using such a basic code.

~~~
bujatt
Hi pi-err, you make really good points.

Also, if every team member could assign tasks, send requests and questions
using this syntax, would that change your perception of this being a top-down
management tool? Because our intention is to build a tool that allows a more
horizontal communication among team members - but that's more difficult to
visualize in a single video.

We are also aware of the cultural-contextual association of colours. This is
one thing we are actually struggling with. While colors are a very easy and
effective way to communicate status of tasks, especially to give a quick
overview of many tasks - they have severe limitations, just like you say, red
evoking associations with something as being "bad".

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erichurkman
If the mini demo on the home page is accurate, be careful with those colors -
light red & green specifically. Full protanopia is present in approximately
1-2% of males. Deuteranopia (less severe than protanopia) is present in some
form in up to 5% of males of certain European descent.

For a reference, this is an approximation of what light red & light green look
like for someone with protanopia:
[http://i.imgur.com/EGSlsmB.png](http://i.imgur.com/EGSlsmB.png)

~~~
bujatt
thanks Eric, this was new to me!

~~~
g_borgulya
What about using icons instead of colors?

~~~
bujatt
Might work but as icons doesn't offer the kind of visual effect that allows
you to oversee 10+ tasks with a glimpse, I would suggest using them both.

------
fortpoint
Interesting idea. Speaking as someone who manages a bunch of folks I don't
find assigning action items w/o due dates very helpful. Is there a facility to
specify a date?

~~~
bujatt
Yes, there will definitely be.

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donaldguy
This is a good idea and I'd like to use it, but it needs presentational work
for adoption, I suspect.

In particular, I don't think that people without a software background are
going to be comfortable with the abundance of syntactic sigils. Even in the
twitter-native world, I think it will makes the product seem intimidating and
un-natural (at least at first).

This is especially a concern because the value of using them is not
immediately clear (excepting @person).

------
itazula
I see that Sarah says that "As you may know ... " so presumably everybody is
on the same page to start, but going forward it seems that only Sarah has a
holistic view of the situation. Is this not the case? And are dependencies
handled? For example, in a more complicated case, should Task A be done before
Task B, etc.?

~~~
bujatt
The free text editor allows you to enter any information to bring the team to
the same page. Deadlines and dependencies are obviously on our roadmap. :)

------
alphydan
How is it different from the old "The Deadline"? (a startup from the now
defunct [http://hackfwd.com/](http://hackfwd.com/) which has been trying this
for a few years). They changed their name to:

[https://www.telety.pe/](https://www.telety.pe/)

~~~
bujatt
alphydan, good point.

Teletype and Twoodo are most similar to our app.

Our approach is somewhat different, more focusing on email compatibility, on
the free text editor experience and more systemic. (We'll post about that
later.)

------
CWIZO
As a non native speaker, I had to look up the definition of succinct, which
was the very first thing I saw on the page. And I consider myself a very good
English speaker.

So you might want to change that word to something a broader audience would
understand.

~~~
bujatt
Hi CWIZO, you are not the first one. Actually this is the most common feedback
we receive. We are iterating on this.

------
rubyn00bie
Looks awesome! I've been wanting something similar to this for a while now.

I wish there weren't 69,772 people ahead of me... (first world problems) :( or
at least some way to gauge what that means.

------
thenipper
This product looks pretty cool. I think i'd want a way to then take this an
export the todos into an already existing workflow. Say into Trello or Outlook
etc.

------
shanth
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9TJTbRw4ri8](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9TJTbRw4ri8)

------
abengoam
Oh wow. I was in the early stages of creating something exactly like this this
myself - looks good guys!

------
omnivore
We surely need this at my large government bureaucracy of an organization.
Thanks for sharing.

------
malloreon
It should be "Fewer messages are more."

You use "less" when the item in question is not measured in discrete units -
"there is less rain today than yesterday."

You use "fewer" when the item in question is measured in discrete units -
"there are fewer raindrops today than yesterday."

Messages are discrete units.

~~~
polm23
You're welcome to believe that nonsense if you like but please don't
perpetuate it.

[http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/myl/languagelog/archives/003775.ht...](http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/myl/languagelog/archives/003775.html)
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fewer_vs._less](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fewer_vs._less)

~~~
jtheory
I'd recommend they find different wording.

There are _plenty_ of people out there who "know" the less/fewer grammar rule,
and those people are going to find this landing page a bit unprofessional.

And I'm not a grammar prescriptivist, but "Less messages are more" still
sounds wrong to my ear -- it's based on the phrase "Less is more", but putting
"messages" in there forces the "is" to "are", and that clashes unpleasantly.
My brain wants to fix it to "Less messages _is_ more", which is then also bad.

"Fewer messages are more" isn't any better -- we lose the "less is more" echo
(which was the whole point!), and it has a whiff of "my English teacher told
me it should be 'fewer'." :)

Alternatives (none perfect, but better):

\- Just use "Less is more" as the heading (and possibly tweak the copy below
to start with the word "messages").

\- Change "messages" to some non-plural word so you can preserve the "is" \--
there may not be a good option here, though ("communication"? ugh).

\- Just toss it, and capture the idea in some other phrase. "Don't drown in
messages", "No message flood", or whatever, then you can even put *"Less is
more" when it comes to messages" in the copy below.

[edit: dumb errors in a post about grammar and word choice tend to backfire]

~~~
bujatt
We just changed it for the simpler: "LESS IS MORE".

------
vjvj
That demo video gets the concept across very neatly and succinctly.

------
shamsulbuddy
You have hit the pain point ..Very useful app ..great job

------
sunforged
typo in your meta

appears during social shares:

"Welcome to opp.io, the actionable messaging platform. Stop waisting time on
emails"

------
trumbitta2
Hello, Oppio is the italian word for Opium, one of the most dangerous drugs
out there.

Just thought you'd wanted to know.

~~~
collyw
Is opium that dangerous? I would have thought that tobacco or alcohol were far
worse.

edit: Wow, that was an extremely quick down vote. Didn't even get round to
posting my follow up with a bit of evidence.

Drugs are bad, m'kay.

~~~
jbm
I didn't mod you down, but it is bad. Opium is probably single-handedly
responsible for the harsh penalties for drug use in East Asia.

This article comes to mind:

[http://www.thefix.com/content/confessions-opium-addict-
drug-...](http://www.thefix.com/content/confessions-opium-addict-drug-
paraphernalia00098?page=all)

And this book:

[http://www.amazon.com/Opium-Fiend-Century-Slave-
Addiction/dp...](http://www.amazon.com/Opium-Fiend-Century-Slave-
Addiction/dp/0345517830)

------
romerro
still loving it!

