
Show HN: Mindstamp – Make Any Video Interactive in Seconds - ladybro
https://mindstamp.io
======
ladybro
Hey all, Brett here, founder of Mindstamp / awkward dude in the demo video.

I spent last year building a social video annotation app called Aech that
never really caught on, but captured interest from a couple people that wanted
the core annotation technology for business.

Mindstamp is the result of those conversations and six months of development
work. It lets you enrich your videos with interactive notes (text, audio,
video), questions, and personalization in just a few seconds before sharing
them with your customers, clients, or teams.

Video is growing rapidly but is still largely a one-way, static asset.
Mindstamp aims to change that by providing an interaction level on top for
both creator and viewer to exchange ideas and gather feedback. We're just
getting started but think there's a lot of room to innovate here.

Built 100% by me with Rails, VueJS, Vuetify, and Heroku ️

I'd love to hear your constructive feedback (please be nice, first real
product shipped) and am happy to answer any questions you might have. And yes,
I'm going to make a better demo video - it's just a placeholder for now.

Thanks for reading!

~~~
anonymous5133
Interesting concept. There are other ways to do this but more for the
technical savvy. So I could see where this comes into play in the sense that
it is focused on a user friendly experience.

The pricing options seem burdensome to me. The whole per month pricing is a
deal breaker to me. The pricing language is confusing as well. What is up with
all these stipulations? Videos expiring....is that really necessary? It needs
to be simplified.

When I see this service what I think is okay...I get it that interactive video
is good and I need it so I want this service. So I want to add one, two, three
or more of these interactive videos to my website. The type of pricing I would
want to expect is some sort of flat rate one-time payment that is not monthly.
You really need to rethink the pricing.I get it that you want the monthly
income but you need to bring people in first with some sort of "wow, this is
an amazing deal" type of offer. The 30 day trial does not cut it for me
personally.

Just me 2 cents.

~~~
tnorthcutt
Hey Brett, consider this a suggestion to completely ignore the pricing
feedback above. Sure, you could price it based on your server costs, but
that's a terrible way to run a business.

Looks to me like you're pricing based on value and to deter support zombies,
so stick with it! Don't worry about anonymous commenters on HN telling you
your pricing is too high.

~~~
ladybro
Noted, thanks Travis :)

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realty_geek
Great work Brett!! You may refer to yourself as the "awkward dude", I'd say
the "authentic dude" ;) A project like this comes across much better when you
get to see the real person behind it.

~~~
ladybro
I truly appreciate the kind words, thank you :)

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realsneil
This is a cool project and a very clear landing page.

One thing I felt was a little jarring while working through the stamps in the
demo video was the audio completely cutting out when a question is posed.
Perhaps having some 'standby' music would help in that way, or even just
fading the audio in and out when the pause happens.

Spotify do this on play / pause.

Great stuff, and good luck with the project!

~~~
davedx
Counterpoint: I like it as it is, the quiet pause gives me space to think. :)

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jesperht
Really slick - great landing page and I love the demo. Clearly demonstrates
what the product does, and I can certainly see the value.

Small nitpick: IDK if intentional, but it seems that you're not quite
sanitizing input. I Added an annotation with
<script>console.log("Hello")</script> and it printed to the console as I
viewed the video.

~~~
ladybro
Whoops :/ Can't believe I didn't take care of that before sharing...fixed now.

Thank you for that and the kind words!

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bryanrasmussen
Hey, I think the part there about the data the users added being saved to your
mindstamp dashboard is good, but I think a lot of companies (especially the
company I just finished a couple years consulting at and whom I'm going to
forward this to) would like to pay for that data to be available to their
scripts on the page.

The context I am thinking of specifically is guided help systems in which you
want a response from a customer before showing some more video or maybe even
switching to another video.

If you think you would be willing to add that kind of functionality in to your
product I can tell them when I pass it on to them and set you up to talk.

~~~
ladybro
Hey Bryan, thanks for this. I agree that surfacing the data for use elsewhere
is the best path forward and it's on the road map. My concern, being so early,
is spending time building the wrong thing / adding the wrong integration when
I don't know exactly how people will want to use it.

I'd love to learn more about what you envision this looking like. Would you
send me an email? brett@mindstamp.io

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exodust
I have some constructive criticism.

The pricing is over the top for what is just timestamps + (any interaction you
can think of) on a video. And it's a subscription model, which is an extremely
optimistic pricing model.

While I believe there is untapped potential for clever video time-stamping
(I've worked a bit on this stuff myself), most of the time viewers don't want
their video interrupted. Nor do video producers want their videos interrupted
due to the fact _timing_ , editing and pace is usually important to a video
presentation.

Asking "what is your name" or inviting other input at key points could be very
useful, but not when it depends on being a member of something called
mindstamp. That's more than friction, that's a brick wall.

Tutorial videos, or complex "paths" for say an interactive story involving
choice, could be a use case, but we're now starting to get excited about the
scraps on offer after most people have said no thanks. In saying that, there
_could_ be plenty of money in the scraps if it's a niche, specific
application. Such as tutorial videos, e-learning, evaluative videos, induction
day training, and so on. But again... the subscription model... ouch.

~~~
ladybro
Thanks for the feedback. A couple things that came to mind:

\- It costs me $ each month to store multiple versions of the video for
different devices and connections. Charging a flat rate per video would be
nice but eventually I'd start to lose money and have to ditch customers.

\- Viewers don't have to be members of Mindstamp. The name / email captured
from the video is sent only to the video owner, not for account creation. That
fact should be clearer if you thought it was the case, though.

\- Not all videos need to be made interactive, and being able to 'opt out' of
the interactions as a viewer is on the road map.

\- The pricing might be over the top for a single individual trying to take
notes on a Youtube video, but for a business customer that is uploading and
streaming multiple videos per month in a professional setting, $39 / month is
a drop in the bucket, especially if it's resulting in a couple fresh leads or
a few hours of email timestamp-ing saved. For now, I'm channeling Patrick
Mckenzie [0] and keeping the prices high.

Thanks again for your thoughts, I truly appreciate you taking the time.

------
Kagerjay
the idea is interesting but there are way too many dialog prompts to get
anything done.

I personally find very little value in this type of video application for
collaboration. A good video presenter should know exactly what questions an
audience has, before the questions asked. When you have a webinar or video,
inside of tools like skype, that's what those chat tools are for. It allows
for asynchronous communication on a predictable level, unobscured and easy for
anyone to grasp immediately. Twitch / youtube-live are also options too.

If you want to make something I would really want -> build a app that allows
you to take timestamps on youtube videos similar to udemy, but unobtrusive.
Youtube has a predictable time duration on each video and time stamps, so this
should be possible via a userscript and or chrome extension, with data input
going to another server / called from the extension. You can opt to do
localstorage but longterm that data should be stored elsewhere.

~~~
ladybro
> I don't like this

> I don't have this problem so nobody else should

> You should build X unrelated technical thing if you want my approval

I don't mean to be rude but this is a quintessential non-helping HN comment.
You should consider re-reading your comments before posting.

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davidpelayo
This is exactly what a product like Edpuzzle does for educational purposes.
[https://edpuzzle.com/](https://edpuzzle.com/)

~~~
ladybro
EdPuzzle looks great. Thanks for sharing.

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getaclue
Nice job Brett. Logged in just to make a suggestion. If you haven't considered
the enterprise angle - I can see this being useful in creating enterprise
video content. Specifically for making e-learning content and such similar
things. You don't know how much this space lacks in proper tooling. Having
said that, I can see some challenges if you have considered or are
considering. I can shed some light if you like. Or if not, best of luck =)
Useful!

~~~
ladybro
Hey, thanks for taking the time to post this!

Definitely considering the Enterprise angle, just trying to feel things out
right now before committing to anything on a larger scale.

I would love to hear what you're thinking about though - could you send me an
email? brett@mindstamp.io

Thanks again!

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soared
Interesting idea. A good use case might be for video tutorials, where the
video could auto-pause and ask when the user has completed the previous step.
I find myself pausing tutorials videos constantly. Another idea might to build
logic in, so that the video asks whether you're following along and will want
pauses, or if you're just watching to learn and won't want pauses between
steps.

~~~
ladybro
Definitely. Conditional logic is on the road map :)

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laex
Pretty cool. Does it handle multiple resolutions of the same video (Eg: 1080p
720p 480p 360p ) ?

~~~
ladybro
Yup! Adaptive bitrate HLS streaming.

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AnnoyingSwede
Awesome project, will follow the development. Thanks for posting, you got all
my upvotes!

~~~
ladybro
Hey, thanks a ton :)

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miket
Interesting idea! Is there any way to customize what the user sees next in the
video based upon how they answer a question?

~~~
ladybro
In the works!

Each answer will have a couple action options: continue playing, move to a
different time in the video, open an external link, or ask for more info.

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ddtaylor
Great idea for some types of content but also a bit frustrating as someone who
doesn't want to "engage"

~~~
simplysh
The interruptions are pretty jarring and I rapidly got annoyed for constantly
being asked for input when I just wanted to watch the video. I get it was a
demo though. I'd like to see some sources to back the claims that people
engage more during video.

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burnt1ce
Very neat! Good job!

~~~
ladybro
Much appreciated :)

