A note-taking app for technical teams | Hacker News Reader

A note-taking app for technical teams

memo.ai

169 pointsalexgotoi44 comments

Mircea, CEO and co-founder of Memo here. We're super excited to announce Memo!

Memo is a note-taking app for technical teams. With Memo it’s quick and easy to save and find code snippets, meeting notes, links, Slack messages, or other short work notes – right inside Slack or on the web.

You can write notes using both Markdown and Slack formatting, including @users, #channels and :emoji:. Organize them in boards, and even link different boards and notes between each other for quick access. All boards can either be kept private or shared with your Slack team.

We're looking forward to hear your feedback or questions!

P.S. We have full support for Slack's new message menus feature: https://blog.memo.ai/10x-your-slack-apps-ux-with-message-men...

I want to add this so that my team can check it out, but I'm very very hesitant because that would mean Memo would be able to see the contents of those notes along with any metadata.

We have very sensitive information in notes and can't afford to widen the surface area of possible data leaks. Sure, Slack might get hacked - that's still an issue.....but adding even more untrusted, unpaid services that can read our information is not a great path to go down.

Fair concern. We have at-rest encryption on our roadmap and our goal is build a profitable business, so maybe we'll earn your trust later on as we iterate.

>We have at-rest encryption on our roadmap

i'm not sure whether you understood the term "at-rest", all that would imply is that the data disk (or perhaps the database) is fully encrypted, but the server holds the decryption key at runtime. that would add no security because anyone who hacked into the application server will still be able to dump + decrypt all the notes, all they have to do is also dump the key from the running server. what you need is end-to-end encryption, so the server only receives the encrypted notes from the client.

Fwiw, I don't think end-to-end encryption would be a great default for our product since it would handicap a bunch of features (like server-side search), but it could be an opt-in feature for specific notes. We do take security seriously and the plan is to do more in the future.

I'm not the OP, but you should know that for security-conscience people the idea of earning trust does not exist. I should never have to trust you, your web dev, your software engineer, your CTO, your devops guy, your cloud provider, your cleaning staff, and your interns. Rather, provide to me a service that is secure even assuming that the aforementioned entities are compromised, then you'll earn my business and my money.

Yeah, I can understand that perspective, but it does require some trade-offs on the product side.

Given that we're targeting technical teams using Slack, we focused on productivity features and usability first, but our roadmap is open to change based on user feedback :)

Client-side encryption and zero-knowledge storage design might give some peace of mind to some users.

Your website looks broken in my iPhone 6s

Looking into it right now!

Should be fixed now.

Seeing the logo and the sign in button overlap on the mobile page on my LG G4. Gets fine when it shrinks as I scroll down.

Thanks for reporting, looking into it right now.

Still seeing it; try "Galaxy S5" mode in the Chrome debugger.

I think it would be huge if you would add a small video or gif to the homepage. I'm having a hard time understanding how the UI works by looking at the screenshot and I find that is critical to me making a decision for a note taking app.

That's a good point! We used to have a video, but it was hard to maintain, but we should revisit that.

We have some different graphics in our Slack App Directory description: https://slack.com/apps/A0G9XHRE0-memo-notes-at-work - do you find these more helpful?

Those are helpful, but I think in addition to isolated screenshots I'd want to see full screen snaps of what the app looks like. This is to help me visualize it in context of my existing work environment/flow on the desktop.

It seems like there is a lot of interplay between participants too and I'd like to see how that works.

Just some cents on my initial reaction to seeing the product. Kudos though!

Thanks for the feedback, we'll look into recording the entire flow from Slack to web app. In the meantime, I don't have a better alternative than signing up :)

Why not?

It seems like an arbitrary sso to offer as the only option.

Got it. One of the differentiators of Memo is the deep Slack integration, for example with the recently launched Message Menus: https://blog.memo.ai/10x-your-slack-apps-ux-with-message-men...

We plan to offer G Suite and GitHub sign-in soon.

Why not normal username+password authentication?

We're focusing the product on "teams" (technical teams more specifically), so signing in with your "team identity" (Slack, G Suite, GitHub, etc.) helps power all the collaborative features (@-mentioning, sharing, etc.)

Slack accounts are separate for each team you join. A lot of people join a handful of public and private teams. This means we have to create an account each time?

For now, yes. We've noticed that quite a few Slack users have multiple teams, but most of them have just one team in which they spend 80% of their time (usually it's their work team).

We're also planning to add other team logins (G Suite & GitHub) and we also expect Slack to improve the experience for users with multiple teams.

Because, at the point where the "sign up with Slack" button is placed, the proposition is not clear enough...

Why would I post proprietary code in your app? I don't know about your security measures.

Yep. Not going to happen at any reasonably paranoid organization.

On the other hand, imagine if this is adopted by one of those clueless marketers at the megacorps and then someone leaks the notes - it will be a much easier read and probably even juicier than the code. Wouldn't that be something!

Just tell them this will hyper-synergize their communications by providing them measurable, AI-powered real time knowledge management. Memo.ai FTW!

Really wanted to test it out but asks to signup using slack, could not join(Currently, I do not have a team to join or login). You should alahways a demo or something; or at least some really simple login/signup!

Sorry to hear, we are planning to add G Suite and GitHub sign-in soon.

If you'd like to get a better idea of the product you can check out the graphics in our Slack App Directory description: https://slack.com/apps/A0G9XHRE0-memo-notes-at-work

We also have more screenshots on our blog: https://blog.memo.ai/

You might want to consider Twitter integration (different target, I know) but you'd solve a huge problem of size limit of 140 chars which people are solving by posting images of text. Also far fewer issues of proprietary content and confidentiality.

We haven't considered that so far since our focus is on technical teams at work, but it's an interesting idea

> Memo is free for teams of all sizes while in beta.

Sounds ominous.

Sorry, English is not my first language. What would be a better way to phrase it?

I think he wants to understand what your future pricing scheme will be before he commits to your system.

We're thinking $3-$5 per active user, but it's early days, so I can't say for sure ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

We'll also make sure early users don’t have to pay for a good chunk of time.

It's good English, but it's not transparent as to what future costs I might encounter if I start using the product while it's in beta, and want to continue using it in the future.

I'm happy to pay to use good software, but it's better to know the pricing plan in advance. I think that https://octopus.com/purchase provides a good example:

> Community edition is free for small teams, even for commercial use. It allows you to deploy up to five projects to up to ten target machines, and is limited to five users.

You're right, we could be more transparent about future pricing. It hadn't come up until now, we'll make sure to address it.

why is this better than free trello?

Good question! We're focused on different use-cases (note-taking vs. project management), as well as a narrower niche (technical teams vs. any group of people, teams, families, etc.).

We use both Trello and Memo in our and the usage is quite complementary.

Do you use Trello for note-taking at work?

Consider developing an extension (browser), not sure if this is secure at all, but think how easy it would be to grab current tabs, highlight-get text from pages, etc... I've got this for myself but it sounds relevant to your app.

Again not sure about security though, but convenient. No need to switch to another tab while deep in the rabit hole of opening links.

Totally agree! A browser extension is on our roadmap, if you're interested to get early access to it I can add you to our "beta program".

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