
Grain, a startup built atop of Zoom for note-taking and video-clip making - bismark
https://techcrunch.com/2020/04/16/grain-a-startup-built-expressly-atop-of-zoom-for-note-taking-and-video-clip-making-raises-4-million/
======
mgadams3
Hey HN. I'm Mike co-founder/CEO of Grain.

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.

~~~
perlgeek
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?

~~~
mgadams3
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.

See:
[https://marketplace.zoom.us/competition](https://marketplace.zoom.us/competition)

~~~
wmeredith
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).

~~~
specialist
Let the sharecroppers do all the research, development, marketing, refinement.
Then steal their thunder.

Been there, been done like that.

------
shunicorn
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.

Good luck Grain team!

~~~
mgadams3
Thanks! We think so too.

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.

~~~
kyawzazaw
Really liking the integration with Notion.

~~~
mgadams3
Thanks. We do to.

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.

------
Ken_Adler
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....

Looking forward to exploring your tool....

~~~
edmundsauto
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?

~~~
Ken_Adler
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...

~~~
andybak
I can't help but think you've found a more complicated and less efficient way
to achieve the same thing as writing up an off-the cuff talk afterwards.

Personally I loathe the spoken word as a medium for efficient transmission of
information. Reading and skim-reading is an order of magnitude faster.

And writing up something I've spoken is the perfect way to focus and clarify.

~~~
Ken_Adler
LOL.... I know what you are saying,

It's interesting how different people process information.

All I can say is that it works for me.... and I find it to be highly impactful
on my co-workers etc.

There is something about capturing nuance that "multimedia" really helps
with....

So my mission is to reduce the effort it takes for me to do this to less then
it takes to just write up and share notes...

------
crazygringo
The video on their landing page does a vastly better job explaining how it
works:

[https://www.grain.co/](https://www.grain.co/)

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.

~~~
chrismorgan
I love that the automatic transcription shown in that video has errors. It’s
realistic, while also showing that enough is accurate that it’s useful.

~~~
mgadams3
Yup, you nailed it.

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.

------
faeyanpiraat
The "Trusted by great teams" section of your homepage lists companies like
"Slack", how did you convince them to start using your product?

~~~
justusthane
Whenever I see these, I suspect it's more along the lines of _someone_ at
Slack is using this product.

~~~
exotree
This is a correct way to interpret it. Just an email address sign up is
usually used as enough justification to make the statement.

~~~
yllus
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?

~~~
Colex
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)

------
chirau
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.

~~~
mgadams3
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.

------
melvinroest
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 :)

[1]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22896157](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22896157)

~~~
mgadams3
Thanks! Will check it out!

------
atjoslin
I even used this for a family call the other day to clip someone's dumb joke
and share it later with fam.

------
ungzd
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".

------
starpilot
"Grain"... Black Mirror reference?
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Entire_History_of_You](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Entire_History_of_You)

~~~
mgadams3
Will have to watch that one later.

------
jaimex2
I wouldn't be spruiking 'built atop of' a product being banned by so many
companies and schools.

If anything you should be pivoting to support as many of the other popular
video conferencing apps out there.

~~~
mgadams3
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.

------
nfc
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

~~~
sureklix
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:)

------
raskilinov
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.

~~~
mgadams3
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.

------
eastbayjake
Very cool stuff, two clarifying questions:

\- 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?

~~~
mgadams3
Great questions.

\- 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.

------
raskilinov
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.

------
shadowpawn
Is this like Camtasia for screenshooting, screencasting and video editing
software? [https://www.techsmith.com/video-
editor.html](https://www.techsmith.com/video-editor.html)

~~~
mgadams3
Not really b/c 1) Grain is real-time and 2) it's not a screen capture.

------
sureklix
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:)

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jackdu224
this is pretty sweet stuff ed and team!

~~~
mgadams3
Thanks Ed's friend! We're lucky he joined our team at the very beginning.

------
imron
> a startup built atop of...

...a third-party company that can kill your business at any time (see for
example what happened with, twitter, facebook etc).

~~~
edoceo
Maybe they shooting for an acquihire play? This thing is more of a Feature
than a Product.

~~~
mgadams3
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.

------
jwr
Speak of a solid foundation to build your company on...

