Launch HN: Hera (YC S21) – macOS app to prepare, join and take notes in meetings

Re:Launch HN: Hera (YC S21) – macOS app to prepare, join and... by kareemm on Thursday July 08, 2021 @10:06AM (#27772092)

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!

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Re:Launch HN: Hera (YC S21) – macOS app to prepare, join and... by louisebayssat on Thursday July 08, 2021 @10:20AM (#27772257)

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.

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Re:Launch HN: Hera (YC S21) – macOS app to prepare, join and... by kareemm on Thursday July 08, 2021 @10:35AM (#27772465)

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.

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Re:Launch HN: Hera (YC S21) – macOS app to prepare, join and... by subpixel on Thursday July 08, 2021 @10:22PM (#27779893)

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.

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Re:Launch HN: Hera (YC S21) – macOS app to prepare, join and... by louisebayssat on Thursday July 08, 2021 @10:55AM (#27772748)

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

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Re:Launch HN: Hera (YC S21) – macOS app to prepare, join and... by kareemm on Thursday July 08, 2021 @12:47PM (#27774561)

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…

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Re:Launch HN: Hera (YC S21) – macOS app to prepare, join and... by GavinMcG on Thursday July 08, 2021 @12:53PM (#27774656)

"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.

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Re:Launch HN: Hera (YC S21) – macOS app to prepare, join and... by guico on Thursday July 08, 2021 @11:04AM (#27772852)

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"?

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Re:Launch HN: Hera (YC S21) – macOS app to prepare, join and... by louisebayssat on Thursday July 08, 2021 @11:39AM (#27773384)

I'm wondering if "tag" or "label" is not more common knowledge?

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Re:Launch HN: Hera (YC S21) – macOS app to prepare, join and... by lowercased on Thursday July 08, 2021 @12:00PM (#27773773)

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.

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Re:Launch HN: Hera (YC S21) – macOS app to prepare, join and... by louisebayssat on Thursday July 08, 2021 @12:59PM (#27774750)

We'll want meetings to be in multiple streams at some point so it's likely that we go with tags!

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