Grain, a startup built atop of Zoom for note-taking and video-clip making

Hey HN. I&#x27;m Mike co-founder&#x2F;CEO of Grain.<p>I decided to start Grain b&#x2F;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&#x27;t see coming when we started.<p>Happy to answer any questions and thanks for the support.

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.<p>I&#x27;m digging the integration features, e.g. slack, imessage<p>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.<p>Good luck Grain team!

Can confirm the &quot;new way of working&quot; when it comes to video clips ...<p>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.<p>I can usually cut down an hour talk&#x2F;call. to around 5-20 minutes of good high impact content.<p>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.<p>I&#x27;ve got the manual workflow down where this is something I don&#x27;t do every day.. but several times a week is fine. Editing ain&#x27;t pretty, but it is effective.<p>Since the lockdown, I have been working on the other end of the &quot;pipeline&quot;... the INPUT to Zoom. After a couple of false starts (OBS, CamTwist, Wirecast...). I ended up implementing Ecamm Studio Pro....<p>Looking forward to exploring your tool....

The video on their landing page does a vastly better job explaining how it works:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.grain.co&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.grain.co&#x2F;</a><p>I&#x27;ve got to say, that for meetings big&#x2F;important enough where you&#x27;ve got someone dedicated to taking notes&#x2F;minutes, this seems like it could be a <i>really</i> effective and compelling way of sharing meeting highlights&#x2F;takeaways&#x2F;fun bits with a broader audience, people who couldn&#x27;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.)<p>But if this works well, hopefully Zoom buys them, and we&#x27;ll expect to see Google and Microsoft build their own versions.

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

Is this a feature or a product? How about 9 months from now? There is a genuine concern with startups built &quot;atop of&quot; 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.<p>Hopefully this is a catapult or an entry point. All the best, regardless.

This post inspired me to repost [1] my side project that I open sourced as a PoC a while ago. I saw &quot;note-taking&quot; in the title and my project allows the type of note-taking that I envision should happen a bit more often (using a stylus).<p>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 :)<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=22896157" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=22896157</a>

I even used this for a family call the other day to clip someone&#x27;s dumb joke and share it later with fam.

Looks like a crutch for poor managery practices which are very common in today&#x27;s IT companies: management stubbornly wants to get rid of ancient technology of writing and to return to even earlier oral-only society.<p>As in oral-only societies, information becomes stored only in minds. After video meetings, no recorded information remains, so let&#x27;s add recording of videos. Recorded videos are unsearchable and poorly seekable, so let&#x27;s add voice recognition.<p>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 &quot;trusted by <i>great</i> teams&quot;.

&quot;Grain&quot;... Black Mirror reference? <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;The_Entire_History_of_You" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;The_Entire_History_of_You</a>

I wouldn&#x27;t be spruiking &#x27;built atop of&#x27; a product being banned by so many companies and schools.<p>If anything you should be pivoting to support as many of the other popular video conferencing apps out there.

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.<p>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&#x27;s inspiring to see other projects working in the same direction

Hi Mike, What particular advantages do you see between grain clips vs written minutes from a meeting?<p>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&#x2F;paragraph.<p>I&#x27;m struggling to see how a video clip can deliver a similar summarisation, unless someone has vocally summarised at the end for the clip.

Very cool stuff, two clarifying questions:<p>- Does Grain require access to the Zoom API to work? (Is there some other screen capture &#x2F; scraping at work?) Any known issues&#x2F;restrictions with using this with enterprise Zoom accounts?<p>- Can I record a Zoom meeting I was invited to, or just ones where I own the invite?

Hi Mike, What particular advantages do you see between grain clips vs written minutes from a meeting?<p>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&#x2F;paragraph.

Is this like Camtasia for screenshooting, screencasting and video editing software? <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.techsmith.com&#x2F;video-editor.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.techsmith.com&#x2F;video-editor.html</a>

Great stuff! I&#x27;m a ML researcher &#x2F; engineer in NLP, and I&#x27;m curious what sort of speech recognition tools you guys are using? I&#x27;m thinking of building really solid SDK&#x27;s in this space:)

this is pretty sweet stuff ed and team!

&gt; a startup built atop of...<p>...a third-party company that can kill your business at any time (see for example what happened with, twitter, facebook etc).

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