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Hey HN community!

I’m Brent, and I wanted to share Retellio—a tool I built to help founders get straight to the point with customer calls. Retellio turns hours of call recordings into podcasts that highlight only the key insights: feature requests, pricing questions, competitor mentions, and more.

The idea came from my experience at a SaaS company where listening to customer calls was crucial to growth but incredibly time-consuming. I kept thinking, “What if there was a way to get just the important stuff?”

How Retellio works: It connects with tools like Gong, Zoom, and Salesforce, combs through your recordings, and finds the best moments. Then, Retellio puts it all together in a short, AI-narrated podcast that you can listen to on your favorite podcast app. No extra steps, just your own private feed with the insights that matter.

Where we’re at: We’re currently in beta and looking for feedback. If you’re a founder, product lead, or anyone who wants faster access to customer insights, I’d love to get your thoughts!

They’ve recently added this functionality to AWS Bedrock thankfully. Doesn’t support OpenAI models, but does support Anthropic.

https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2023/11/amazon-be...

I reject the framing of The Gray Zone as anti-war. Anti-US imperialism sure, but not anti-war. They have no problem minimizing the suffering of millions at the hands of some of the most brutal regimes on the planet. Calling them anti-war is like calling Alex Jones a scientist.

Wikipedia doesn’t allow for The Grayzone to be used as citations because it’s pro-authoritarian propaganda that launders the worst takes from dictators around the world. You’ve got Syrian regime apologism, Uyghur genocode denialism, and rampant conspiracism. You can package that up as “anti-war” if you want, but I think pro-authoritarian is more accurate.

Hickel gets basic facts wrong and distorts the views of his critics.

The thread below walks through some of the basic errors he makes.

https://twitter.com/MaxCRoser/status/1378730932308471809

Sure, there are some bad enterprise software companies. What does this have to do with the original point though?

100% agree.

I used to be a very "analytics focused" product manager until I joined an enterprise software company that hardly uses them and is wildly successful.

We're succesful because we talk to our users about everything. I spend most of my time talking to customers and watching them use the software. We occasionally use analytics to help us validate hypotheses or assumptions, but that's always complimented with a full range of qualitative methods.

Analytics can help with observation, but it'll never give you the "why". In my experience only observation and a lot of conversations will get you there.

The section you quoted defines exactly what it means by product definition - and the entire thing is a definition of value proposition canvas. If you can't understand the meaning of these things when they're clearly defined then I don't know how to help you.

I like how the example you used actually uses plain language "what it is, who it is for, and when/where it will be used", but because you approached this with the mindset that you're right and UX people dumb, you failed to see that and disproved your own assertion.

Interesting. I wonder how one would measure whether an institution changes student trajectories? Or if that data is available somewhere.

Despite being "trapped in a bureaucracy" Canadians experience healthcare outcomes that are, on average, better than those experienced by Americans. Care is prioritized by need and urgency - not by money, but this results in a fairer and more equitable system.

Maybe? But you haven't made a case supporting that's why they went down the tubes.

I think you underestimate the role of a leader in building an organization like Amazon.

The things you handwave away - putting a business need in place, letting C levels percolate the concepts until a strategy emerged, they are all evidence of effective leadership.

It's wickedly difficult to set the initial conditions for emergent organizational success. Simply discounting Bezos by saying that he threw piles of money at the problem with the right people in the room is misunderstanding what his job is. His job is to get the right people in the room - identifying the right people is very hard. The more difficult job is listening to what they say. Casting aside your own ego and confronting difficult data. Most leaders have too little courage and too much ego to be able to do this effectively.

If you'd like insight into how important having the right leader can be then I'd recommend starting by reading the book Good to Great by Jim Collins or at least the chapters on leadership.