Launch HN: Hera (YC S21) – macOS app to prepare, join and take notes in meetings
Hi HN, we're Bruno and Louise, the founders of Hera (https://hera.so)! Over the past 5 months, we have built a MacOS desktop app to prepare, join, and run meetings without the grunt work. Basically, we try to help busy knowledge workers have good meetings without spending all day preparing or scrambling to find back that note in Apple Notes.
We were our first users. As a PM, I was spending an unreasonable amount of time preparing user research interviews and kick-off meetings and sharing summaries to the team. A good 45-min meeting would effectively cost me about 2 hours of mental bandwidth. The private beta we launched 4 months ago helped us find good ways to attack the problem:
Meetings are broken partly because they are seen as isolated entities in calendar and note-taking tools. We want to make each meeting live next to other related meetings. Kind of like a thread of emails, but for your meetings (think of your weekly product meeting or one-on-one).
There is a missed opportunity to automate low-value repetitive tasks as well. Let's say you're interviewing customers for something, your calendar is filled with meetings called "User research with [John]". You should be able to jump into each of these meetings with a template automatically applied, and an easy way to mark highlights to feed a broader source of truth. If you're interested, we've written more extensively about this here: https://medium.com/hera-hq/your-meetings-deserve-an-inbox-no.... Long story short, our users can swiftly prepare, join, and take notes in meetings.
We were pleasantly surprised by the willingness of users to prepare for meetings, before it was officially supported in the product. We tried to make this step as easy as possible: one click to use a template and past related meetings are visible during your preparation. Today, about 50% of the meetings in Hera are prepared beforehand.
Unlike tools like Notion, the note-taking experience during meeting is intentionally constrained (only headers and bullet points). We've made it easy to mark a bullet point as a highlight or a next action. To avoid the "I took notes but never used them" curse, we've included easy-to-use exports to Google Docs/Slack/Todoist. To avoid the "What did we say last time?" curse, archived meetings are easily searchable, by title, topic, or attendee.
We have a strong focus on speed and keyboard shortcuts in the app, because taking notes in meetings can be hard :)
Premium version at $10/month, free version has unlimited features and 4 meetings notes/week. We have set up a discount code HERAHN (20% off for the first three months) for the HackerN ews community. Have a try and let us know what you think! Direct link to install the app: https://www.notion.so/Hera-Download-Link-d61273f127314353b1a.... You can also check a 2-min product tour here: https://www.loom.com/share/d227cb4216584d0880be8989b4cb5a59
We would love to get your feedback on the product and hear about the main pain points you have regarding meetings: Is it preparing them, taking notes, refocusing after/before, or just getting value out of them. We'll stick around all day to answer your questions and remarks! I have been looking for a tool that better connects meetings to notes. I have some local scripting to connect meetings to notes and collect TODOs across my dozens of meetings/week. It looks like Hera could've replaced a lot of my custom setup! But storing in your cloud, and needing access via G Suite is a non-starter. You won't get much for early adopters in top-end enterprise if you need _yet more apps installed in G Suite_ AND _sync to yet another cloud for infosec to have to vet_. > Hey infosec, I have a new vendor that needs access to G Suite and it syncs unencrypted meeting notes to their cloud. vs. > Hey infosec, I have a local application that reads from Mac's calendar integration and stores notes locally. There's definitely a segment of people for which GSuite access and cloud storage of notes is a non-starter, but in many cases those can be mitigated even when it comes to early adopters in larger enterprise companies (eg SOC-2 compliance). On top of that, you get a lot of the usual benefits when using a collaborative tool: others can help take notes for your meetings so that effort is shared, agendas can be prepared beforehand, contributed to by all the meeting attendees, and easily accessed via your meeting invite. Understood, right now your meeting notes are not encrypted, but stored in a secure database on our server. We are currently considering two options to make sure your notes are safe: either end-to-end encryption on our servers or offline-based storage for your notes. Thanks for the remark I was super excited until I saw this; I guess I'll have to wait. Offline storage is essential for a number of reasons, not the least of which is the ability to reach my notes if Hera is having an outage. Totally understandable! Look at Agenda. You connect your calendar locally (with optional iCloud or Dropbox sync) and then you have a note that’s attached to a calendar event and a project (client name, coworker name, whatever.) Each note has a to-review/to-complete status and you can save searches to keep on top of your notes and plan ahead. It’s a really smart model and saves me a lot of time. This app sounds really cool. I am very interested in using it. However, I have read your Privacy Policy, and I see that you collect PII like the following: * Events on all your calendars (Understandable) * Information about your Google Drive files (?!?) * Title, description, default time zone, and other properties of Google calendars you have access to (So other people's data). You say that you may use your collected data for marketing: * to provide you with news, special offers and general information about other goods, services and events which we offer that are similar to those that you have already purchased or enquired about unless you have opted not to receive such information; This, to me suggests that you may legally sell my Google Drive files to the highest bidder. You also provide a broad justification for improving your services, which means you could legally look at my plaintext events and messages as part of "user research" for how people use my service: * to gather analysis or valuable information so that we can improve our Service; This is unacceptable in a corporate environment. I suggest you may want to re-word your Privacy Policy, and make it clear explicitly what you do and don't do with each piece of information. Sorry Danny, it's a big mistake on our side, the privacy policy should be crystal clear. - On calendar's data: we only use the title, description, etc. of the calendars you have chosen to sync in Hera.
- On google drive files, I will clarify this right now, but basically we have an export feature to google docs, which is entirely opt-in. If you want to use the feature, the first time of course you need to give us access to a small subset of your GDrive - We do not and never intend to sell any of these data to anyone. I reword the privacy policy so that's crystal clear:) Hu bruno, I really like the project. There was an a comment by someone about $100 for a mac app. We pay for a many mac apps that solves a problem for us and at present meetings are an issue. I have been juggling among apps to solve this exact issue. The alternatives suggested like itsycal and meeter don't've the note taking and template support especially to look at the history of notes in previous meetings. This is a feature usually found in CRMs. A feature request or a blocker in using this for us? The notes are stored on your server, we can't have that. Exporting to google docs isn't really helpful, if you could somehow store them locally (encrypted of course) and sync them to our google docs where we don't need to export them and are automatically available as google docs where we can search through them, it would be great. Totally get that the safety of your meeting notes is top priority.
We have not yet settled on whether we want to choose the "notes stored locally" path or the "fully encrypted on our server" path, mainly because of the impact on features we want to build in the upcoming years. We will communicate publicly as soon as we take a strong stance. I would +1 the ability to store my notes locally, with an optional sync to Google Docs or even your own server I've logged your feedback, thanks! Be aware that the "fully encrypted on our server" path is still not going to satisfy many customers. At the least, many of them (like my employer) would want to insist on a "bring your own key" ability, and would ask a lot of questions about where your keys are stored, who has access to them, and what you have the ability to do. Besides all of that, though, the "store files locally" option gives me the option to put those files anywhere, including in various cloud storage accounts of my own to share with other people, thus giving me a lot more flexibility and control over with whom and how I share meeting content. That might really be the better way to go. I agree with your analysis, but I think there is significant impact on features you can build on top of "store files locally", including collaborative features (sharing meeting notes without too much frictions)
On a personal note, I prefer the locally stored path as well. Consider that if you were selling an email product customers like this would demand local storage for that too. The market for people and large companies who have already gone full Google Apps is huge. Focus there. Don't worry about the haters. The market of Mac users who need more efficient meetings who'd pay $10/m for that and don't care about using an Electron app (or don't know what one is) is huge. This looks pretty useful. I like: 1. Templatized meetings. I do this already - I pull up templates/new-client.txt, duplicate it (most of the time), and then take notes. It's annoying to do. Hera's workflow is really nice. 2. Rules to pick a template based on meeting title is really useful 3. It's not clear what "Streams" are. I grokked the mental model while watching the Loom screencast UNTIL you the Rules section and you brought up the concept of a Stream. No idea what that is but it made me think that my mental model for the software was incomplete. 4. I love that you export to todo apps. Many note taking tools assume you're not using another todo app - Hera acknowledges the reality that you almost certainly are. A vote to integrate w/ Things. 5. It seems like Hera is an ephemeral place to TAKE notes, but not necessarily KEEP notes. Like a scratch pad where notes are taken and then disseminated to a todo list or Slack/Gsuite/Notion. Is that the intention? Related: a vote to export to Evernote please. Will definitely try it out. Good work! Thank you very much for this detailed feedback :)
- Your analysis of Streams is very on point -> as of now, users struggle to understand what it does. in the next few days, we're gonna automatically create streams for your recurring meetings and you'll see them in a dedicated space. It should be easier with the adoption moving forward. But basically, streams are like tags for emails.
- The product as it is indeed better to take notes rather than keep and search them. We're gonna rework the search so that you can easily find what you're looking for in past meetings on Hera. But really the goal for us is that you can take actions based on your notes, be it on Hera or elsewhere afterwards. I would think hard about whether keeping notes in Hera is important. I'm not sure it is. Personally I already keep other notes and meeting notes on my filesystem though I'm moving things to Evernote. But I don't want meeting notes in one place and other notes in another. And unless Hera becomes a tool for non-meeting notes, I'll use Hera to take meeting notes but keep them elsewhere. Re: Streams - still not entirely clear to me what they are. One way to frame a new feature is to explain the scenario first, and then how the feature solves that pain, and then naming it. So it might be something like: "If you struggle with grouping your notes from similar meetings together so you can find them easily (scenario) we solve that by using Streams in Hera (which are basically tags). So you can easily click on the 'onboarding' stream to see notes from all your onboarding meetings in one place. This is helpful when you're trying to xyz." Also if streams == tags I'd think hard about whether to introduce a new name for an existing concept that all of your users already understand... unless it truly is a different concept. I disagree. An app like this has to mail reviewing all of my notes and finding things. I think exporting todos and focusing on highlights is smart - that’s all you really truly need in the end. But if I put notes in I expect them to be there and to be accessible and useful. I love the way you frame what streams are. And I would add that they basically help you be relevant in your meetings as you get access to the relevant context (= notes from past meetings in that stream).
I also agree that we may have used a exotic joker with the name "Stream" when there was no need Btw one thing I’ve been doing is keeping all notes with a person in a single document. It’s just easier to open up joesmith.txt instead of rooting around in the ten files (or searching across them) to find what I’m looking for. This approach is helpful when getting context on past meetings - I can skim notes from the most recent call instead of having to find and open the right file, then move back to the current one. Food for thought… "Context" or "Topic" might be a better name that conveys the use. "Tag" is technical and I always fail to use tags because I don't think of how I'll be helped by them in the future. To me streams are a collection of meetings of the same kind, and the notes related to those all in one place. I personally think the name of the feature could be better. Maybe "Series"? I'm wondering if "tag" or "label" is not more common knowledge? I would also think you can 'tag' something with multiple labels/tags. Meeting X might be 'onboarding','sales','q4', findable by any of those tags. If it's in a 'stream' called 'onboarding'... that feels like something that is siloed away. Something wouldn't naturally be in 5 streams, but could naturally have 5 tags. We'll want meetings to be in multiple streams at some point so it's likely that we go with tags! Wow, the demo was awesome. A game changer in the way we all do work meetings. Love the way you can simply turn certain notes into highlights by hitting "cmnd+D" and they appear on the right panel! I'm going to use that feature a lot. Thank you so much for your support! I'm very interested in this. I think I'm the target customer and the loom demo made me think, "I need this." I work for a big company and have many meetings with many different stakeholders, and I love the incremental adoption where I don't have to persuade the company to buy something, I can just get it and plug it in for myself. I have a blocker on plugging it in, though: we're a Microsoft Exchange shop. Now, it's easy to sync Exchange to my Mac calendar, but it is not easy to sync Exchange to Google calendar. (Googling, seems like the most reliable way is to PUBLISH your calendar... something I don't think my security / IT folks would appreciate.) I could also use Zapier it looks like, but I'd quickly run over the 100 tasks/mo in the free tier. I have nothing against electron—power to you for solving a real problem I have, and using javascript to do it quickly. But I do think popping open EventKit to hook into the system calendar would be a solid next feature. Then people like me who are locked into Exchange will be able to use your product without ugly/brittle/security-degrading hacks. Great point, well articulated.
Our product does not officially support Exchange (mostly due to dev bandwidth limitation :( ) BUT if you can subscribe to your Exchange calendar in a Google Calendar (linked to any Google Account) then you can try Hera without any frictions because Hera will be able to pull your meetings from the Exchange calendar. I've seen resources for that: https://www.howtogeek.com/435975/how-to-show-an-outlook-cale.... Let me know or shoot me an e-mail at bruno at hera dot so if you need any help! Thanks for the response, and the link. The trouble with this method is that it creates a publicly-accessible, unauthenticated feed of my calendar and all the event data in it. I don't deal in a lot of particularly sensitive trade secrets, so I'm less concerned than others on this thread about the notes being unencrypted in your cloud. Encryption would be great, but I have a reasonable expectation that you're not just letting anybody who finds it scoop up your whole database. But that's what publishing a calendar feed does. I can't leave an open door to the internet (however obscure) to all the potentially confidential information that someone might send me as part of an event. I'll have to wait for "real" exchange support. Very cool. So needed. I will absolutely try your product. Your approach to "workflow" appears spot on. I love the template idea. I always insist on an agenda, minutes, wrap up (next steps). When I secretary for meetings, I create a shared doc, so others can help me live edit, proofread, etc. Having just watched the 2 min tour, maybe a future feature request. Ditto versioning. When minutes get sent out, there's always some kind of followup, errata. My prototypical shared doc (which I just copy for each new meeting) has date, topic, participants, etc. Since I'm mistake prone, I often forget to update some info. Fields for that stuff would be terrific. I like the highlight (annotation) feature. In my future perfect world, meeting minutes would be sync'd somehow to the actual recording. I rarely need full transcription, but embedded timestamps (to jump into recording) would be awesome. I've done this manually and it's a lot of work. Thanks for sharing. Hera is really compelling. Happy Hunting! Thank you for the kind words!
Btw, when you export your meeting notes to Notion for instance, we do add the date, meeting title & attendees emails :)
We've also been thinking about being able to record 1min snippet audios but haven't prioritised it yet in the roadmap! Yeah it's an electron app, this puts me off instantly, on my macbook i prefer to use native tools since my experience with electron apps = faster battery drain.. that's not desirable.. apple provide best frameworks to design UIs easily (SwiftUI), please use that This is fantastic and congrats on the launch. I'm a little bitter as I just spent an hour yesterday creating an Apple Shortcut to create a note for my next or current meeting, but Hera obviously does so much more than that. Ignore the naysayers. Being an Electron app is not a dealbreaker for 99% of people and I see the feature list and just say "Yes, yes yes!" to all of it. One question that is vital to me: where are the notes stored? Is it in the cloud? Are they encrypted? I ask because my company has rather strict controls on this, and does not want sensitive meeting notes being stored with third parties that have not been verified. Looking forward to watching this tool grow and develop. Thank you for the kind words :)
Right now your meeting notes are not encrypted, but stored in a secure database on our server. We are currently considering two options to make sure your notes are safe: either end-to-end encryption on our servers or offline-based storage for your notes. This is interesting, but i'm not sure whether you this kind of integration with the meeting itself. Mac + Google cal might be a little limiting no? What's the % of total market there? You may want to just have a version of this app that doesnt do meeting integrations but has these features for note taking that are nice (templates, stylings, etc). You're entering a pretty crowded market. Have you taken a look at Fellow? https://fellow.app/ Just trying to figure out what makes this product better than the hundreds out there. Yes, Fellow is one of the first company to build a meeting-centric solution!
Few significant differences:
- Hera is very single-player, our product is built around making YOU more productive with your meetings
- There is a strong focus on automation. Let's say you use a template for one occurence of a weekly meeting, Hera will suggest you to create a rule to do that automatically for all the future occurrences.
- A other point, that might seem trivial but is definitely not: Hera is FAST, and entirely usable with the keyboard. We believe it's actually key to be able to use such product DURING a meeting, when your mental bandwidth is dedicated to the ongoing discussion I used Fellow briefly, but it was so incredibly slow. Glad to hear you are putting a big focus on performance! Submitted myself to the beta. I love the idea of a desktop app, but don’t understand the monthly fee. What’s the advantage to me as a user to pay $10/month for the rest of my career. Is it possible that you could figure out a one time price that lets me buy the software? I like the idea of improving my meetings, but try to minimize recurring fees. Also the price/value seems wonky as I pay $10/month for office365 with a TB of cloud storage Great remark.
The recurring fee is mainly tied to the fact that the value you get from Hera should grow over time. The more meeting notes you write into Hera, the more connected all your meetings will be and the more context Hera will be able to provide you in each meeting. It's not like a one-time tool that you always use to do the same thing.
I am not saying that we won't test one-time price at some point, but it's not in our short-term plans. You're juggling a lot of stuff right now (congrats) but might suggest something like jetbrains' structure - $x gets me lifetime access to version X. The notion of "well you will get value from it over time" isn't, imo, a great way to frame it. Even if your feature set doesn't grow, you have connections to external services, and they will have changes over time that you'll need to keep up with (auth protocol changes, etc). That takes attention and time and money. BUT... perhaps a "standalone" version that doesn't connect with asana/google/etc. might have a 'one time price'? Another consideration is the goodwill this will create with your customers, increasing their tendency to promote you. This matters more when your default mode is single-player than when your default mode is corporate buy-in. I don’t understand what this means. My meeting notes are just text files stored? It doesn’t seem to be doing anything extra over time and seems to just be client side processing so no long term external resources are required. Your meeting notes are linked together if they are linked to the same "group of meetings" (that we call Streams).
So that when you enter your "Weekly Product", Hera gives you a quick access to the outcomes (highlights, next actions) of the previous Weekly Product(s) meetings Also, Hera tries to understand (nothing fancy or machine learning-related) what you do with your meetings.
If you always use the same template of notes in meetings with a title "1o1 John - Bruno", Hera will suggest you to do it for you in the future. I like the concept here, but absolutely cannot abide anything that makes it more necessary to have laptops open in meetings. If this were iPad or iOS focused, I’d be far more likely to use it for me and my teams, as cutting down on laptop distractions has been one of the big meeting wins. This looks useful for someone with a lot of meetings to keep track of. The one thing I noticed watching the demo was the odd way keyboard shortcuts were displayed. There is no "+" between the modifier key(s) and the letters/digits... it's just ⌘1 or ⌘D (not ⌘+1 or ⌘+D). Thanks for the comment, it would indeed probably clarify the shortcuts! I am using a similar approach using NotePlan. Especially with it support for templating and command palette. Combined with the plugins support I have a nice approach going for creating daily notes and meeting minutes Pretty cool tool. Is it possible to accompany notes, with agendas etc. In my gov/orgs in the UK at least, it is protocol to send an agenda before the meeting, and the notes after [along with actions]. Cool product! I find that the headline is a bit hard to read. I think "Get back control over your meetings" reads easier. You're the second to suggest that, we are implementing the change on the home page as we speak, thanks :) Awesome! Good luck with the launch! You must be getting this a lot but since no one has asked here - how does Hera compare against otter.ai? how is this better than clicking on Day in google calendar and using a meeting notes template in notion? To name a few:
- Tight integration between your calendar and the context (notes, actions) related. The notes you take are automatically linked to this calendar event, the attendees, potential past related meetings - The notes you take in Hera can feed into other tools, for instance Todoist for your next actions. - Fewer friction points: you click on one button and it opens your Zoom/GMeet/... and your notes where you find back your preparation. Spinning a new page in Notion is not that hard, but you would be surprised by what small friction points do over time. Does this integrate with Zoom? I’m guessing notes are stored on your server? - Hera opens whichever videoconferencing tool it finds in the calendar invitation (and we open Zoom links with your native app) - Right now your meeting notes are not encrypted, but stored in a secure database on our server. We are currently considering two options to make sure your notes are safe: either end-to-end encryption on our servers or offline-based storage for your notes. I would personally like to see offline storage. Your current model of unencrypted on your database is a big no for me. Really like this, congrats on the launch! To the people moaning about Electron apps... you're not the market. To the people moaning about $100 price... you're not the market. To the people moaning about Mac-only... you're not the market. To the people who missed the value-prop COMPLETELY and think some free taskbar widget is the whole idea... you're not the market. IMO if you're managing 10+ people and have 10+ meetings a week (i.e. are an executive, founder, or otherwise in leadership), and this helps you get even 10% better at meetings, you'd do it in a heartbeat. The fact is that in most startups and even larger tech companies, meetings remain one of THE most important decision/collaboration fulcrums that exist. One might say that "being better at meetings" is one of the most important things you can do as a leader. Final comment to the naysayers - I'd like to introduce to a little startup/email client called Superhuman. I'm sure these naysayers were posting all these negative hot takes on that too. And the naysayers were wrong then. Because they aren't the market. Congrats guys! > To the people moaning about Electron apps... you're not the market. To the people moaning about $100 price... you're not the market. To the people moaning about Mac-only... you're not the market. To the people who missed the value-prop COMPLETELY and think some free taskbar widget is the whole idea... you're not the market. Then who's the market? Because it's obviously not us and I think the (accepts Electrons) ∩ (uses mac os) ∩ (pays for expensive apps) population is VERY restricted. And why post it here if we are not the market? > missed the value-prop COMPLETELY The idea of "value proposition" is so absolutely inane. If people were always paying for a what a tool is "worth" in term of revenues then working would be useless as you would be spending as much on your tools as to what they bring. Do you value Linux at >50K a year? Would you pay 5000$ a month to use an OS? No? Well that's weird because that seems in line with its "value proposition". > I'd like to introduce to a little startup/email client called Superhuman. I'm sure these naysayers were posting all these negative hot takes on that too. And the naysayers were wrong then. Because they aren't the market. Then stop advertising this type of apps here. > (accepts Electrons) ∩ ... Outside of a small vocal group of people mostly concentrated on HN and prone to give crappy hot takes, practically everyone in the world "accepts Electrons". Practically everyone accepts them where there is no better solution. And usually there is no better solution because third party integrations to online services (think Stack, Discord, etc.) are limited or aren’t kept up-to-date with official apps. Or, in Discord’s case, are outright against the ToS and not worth people’s bother. > Then who's the market? Because it's obviously not us and I think the (accepts Electrons) ∩ (uses mac os) ∩ (pays for expensive apps) population is VERY restricted. The market is people that have a lot of meetings and invest a lot of time in preparing/documenting them. By the way, you are talking as if the set of people who accept electron apps and pay for expensive apps is a fixed one. It's a tradeoff. It the app is good enough, people won't care that it's Electron or that it's expensive (and, for the record, few people care about Electron apps). > The idea of "value proposition" is so absolutely inane. The value proposition of something is not the price, but what it gives to the user. > you would be spending as much on your tools as to what they bring. The value you offer is the value offered by your tools plus the value you add by working with them. The hackernews community has a broader range of thought than you give it credit for - not everyone is against electron apps. The top comment on this post is supporting that, and everyone who +1'd it. pays for expensive apps: 100s of millions of people
uses mac os: 100s of millions
knows what electron is: 431,882 weekly downloads. I'm making a bit of a joke here, but the market is plenty huge for this app. Also, not all of Hackernews is developers who have opinions on electron. e.g. Me. > you're not the market I think it's a bit too easy to use this to justify whatever decision you make. After all, you can always define your market to be whatever set of people like your product and are willing to put up with whatever set of restrictions is imposed. That isn't to say that this is never a valid point to make, for example I think "if you don't see the point of this, you're not the market" is absolutely reasonable. I can also accept it when talking about the price. However, I don't see how it applies to the Operating System restriction and to a lesser extent the complaints about Electron. My primary machines from work run Windows, but that doesn't say anything about the number of meetings I have, how much I prepare for them or what value this application has to me. I see potential for this to be quite useful and would have no qualms paying the subscription fee if it turns out to save me time over my current workflow. I think that makes me part of the market for the tool. But I probably won't find out if it's useful or pay for it anytime soon because the application doesn't run on my machine. I can see many colleagues being in a similar boat. If not fulfilling the system requirements automatically makes me "not the market" and you're happy doing your business constrained to "the market", then you're obviously allowed to do that. The authors, and hardly anyone else for that matter, owes me a Windows app or any other product. But I don't think saying "I'd use this, but I don't use macOS" is naysaying or implies "you can never build a successful business" if done respectfully. It enables the creators to gauge interest and decide whether to invest resources into opening up another segment of potential users. We can also be the target market giving feedback. The idea that everyone who doesn't agree with you isn't the target market would revolutionize product management if true ;) My mind also immediately went to Superhuman while reading about Hera. I think the product has a lot of potential! Definitely a big inspiration for us! Thanks:) Thanks for the kind words! Looking forward to seeing you on Hera!:) so, are you implying that this is tool is actually a status symbol to show off to other founders and your (less fortunate) employees? What I inferred from the comment is that there are some users who attend most meetings and some who have to organize most of them. It doesn't have to be a status symbol for employees. Whoever organizes the meetings, takes notes, exports them to relevant tools would need that. I'm thinking of a product manager taking a meeting with the designers developers etc. Looks great. sorry to undermine your efforts but someone has to say this: as a Mac user, i won't be paying $100/year for electron app will stick to itsycal, a freeware, "real" macOS app, i've paid $10 for not affiliated, but feel free to check out:
https://www.mowglii.com/itsycal/ I'm sure the founders of Hera know this, but just so there's clear representation here on HN: as a Mac user, I would happily pay $100/year for anything that makes my meetings better. I'd pay more than $100/year. I'd pay $100/year for every person on my team. I don't care if it's an electron app, or 10 lines of Javascript: if it makes meetings better, I'm in. You imply that you might, but are you actually planning on buying this? I'm curious because I see lots of people saying they would use something, but it doesn't always mean they will. I'm sold on the concept and vision, I've installed it: if it does deliver value -- which I suspect it will -- I'll absolutely pay for it (I'd have to! I have more 4 meetings per week) and will advocate for it within my team. Meeting inefficiency costs my company thousands every month. This doesn’t make any sense in context of the actual paid app market. If you cared about paying for time-saving meeting quickjoin and automation software you’d already be paying for Fantastical, Agenda, etc. and you’d be mentioning it here. I think you’re confusing price for actual utility here. I do wish this team luck but they aren’t doing enough for the money, given what $50-100/year per team member already gets you. you would, but you don't have to, especially when there are free alternatives around ;) There are free alternatives for email, to-do list apps, time tracking software, etc., and people still pay for tools that make them more productive. The fact that you won't pay for it doesn't mean that others won't. Just to make sure the value prop of Hera is clear (given the alternative itsycal): Joining your meeting in one-click is a small fraction of our value proposition.
The core of what users do in Hera is around efficiently preparing and taking actionable notes in meetings. Feel free to check the Loom demo done by Louise and don't hesitate if you have any questions! checked out, now i understand that you're a WYSIWYG editor for editing calendar events and a menubar app to join meetings correct? The main value prop is note taking and the workflow around it: 1. Creating and choosing a template for a meeting. e.g. my 1 on 1 vs new customer onboarding vs. customer research meetings all have different formats. I have a template in a text file today that a duplicate before every meeting. It's annoying. 2. Being able to mark and export todos from your notes to the place where I keep todos. 3. Being able to share your notes. 4. Being able to export notes to Slack/Notion/Google Docs for my teammates who don't use or need to use Hera Seeing my next meeting in the menubar and joining is the least interesting part of Hera. No horse in the race here. But if you're going to comment you may want to do the work to comment fairly. The sum total of the work I did was watch the 2 minute Loom video - so it's not even a lot of work to do. No, it's not: You can see Hera as a note-taking app entirely dedicated to meetings.
It's easy to take notes in meetings, capture highlights or next actions that you can then either export to other tools or easily access in your future meetings. thanks for explanation! and sorry for me being hostile should say, the automation feature is pretty neat though :) No problem, thanks for taking the time to comment :) name some free alternatives. I can't really understand the reasoning behind making a macOS-exclusive Electron app. You don't get any of the benefits of making an application specifically made for one operating system, and you don't get any of the benefits of a cross-platform framework. I was wondering the same thing, it would have likely been faster to build this with native frameworks. additionally, Hera only seems to work with Google itsycal connects macOS calendar locally - no need to sign up any calendar will work, as long as you can add it in the "Internet Accounts" settings i use Teams with Outlook Calendar for work and with recent update you can join meetings too in single click Hera indeed only works with Google calendar but we support any videoconferencing tool - we just open the link that we find in the invitation! I honestly wouldn't be able to tell whether it's electron or anything else... maybe people who can tell them apart aren't the target group for this? There’s also Meeter: https://trymeeter.com/ I am a Itsycal user, but I fail to see how it -or Calendar.app for that matter- solves the same problem as Hera. Can you ellaborate? Did not know about itsycal, thanks for the pointer.
On pricing, please note that there's a good free version :) Is it a real macOS app, as in AppKit? If so, I’m in. I want this kind of tool, but don’t want any more Electron junk on my desktop. Our current version is on Electron :(
The bundle size is unfortunately significantly larger than a native MacOS app but we are very cautious with performance, memory and speed so if we did our job right you won't tell the difference from an UX perspective! Hey Bruno - sounds like a cool concept - wishing you both all the best! Just looking at the screenshot (and being afflicted with the pedantry of being the son of an English teacher), would ‘Ready to take back control of your meetings?’ be more usual/a little less clumsy wording-wise? Not that I think what you’ve written is ‘wrong’ - in some ways it’s fresher/more unusual (‘Ready to bring sexy back to meetings?’ :), but anyhow that’s my tuppence worth! touché, our french origin is exposed :)
We've had this feedback before, I am going to change that, thanks for the suggestion! ‘En garde!’/‘Zut alors! Pas de problème, mon ami! (…that’s probably all wrong heheh..) Your English is certainement a billion times better than my French! :) Bonne chance! Merci!! why would anybody keep using this, when macOS Monterrey is on the way and it has "Quick Notes" built in? Hmm. It seems you posted this after apologizing for being hostile in another thread, where Hera’s capabilities (which are… very different from “Quick Notes”) were explained to you. You’ve made several comments at this point incorrectly summarizing and then dismissing the project. What’s your aim here? I think Notes will work fine for most people if you don't attend many meetings, but Hera is for power users. If you attend many meetings a day I can see the real value in this. Your app looks fine and interesting, The problem is the audience you are choosing, Mac users are very elitist. I am sure you can get some market in Windows instead of Mac using electron, the windows users does not care which tech you used but that it just works and gets the job done. Of course Windows users also they do not want trash but if have good performance and it works, It is fine. Good insight, I agree with you.
We have found great fit with co-founders of early stage start-ups and product managers in high growth start-ups.
Mac is overly present in this target audience, hence our initial start on MacOS! That being said, it's on us to show users that a well-crafted Electron app can behave as nicely as a native one. Down the road, we might switch to a native app if we believe it would significantly deliver more value to our users. If you are considering a native version, then you are not prioritizing multiplatform which is Electron's strong point. Why choosing it insted of something like Catalyst? Mind you, I am not against Electron apps on my mac (Evernote user here heh) Good question, mainly two points:
1. We had deep expertise in Electron and web dev. We are 4 months old so we wanted to validate the problem AND our solution as quickly as possible. 2. Meetings, by essence, have many stakeholders. Some (if not most) of the attendees are not on Hera and this is where having our core product mostly web compatible will proved to be useful - we can easily spin up for instance a public page to share the outcomes of your meeting to people not using hera Sounds reasonable to me!