Show HN: Mindstamp – Make Any Video Interactive in Seconds

Hey all, Brett here, founder of Mindstamp / awkward dude in the demo video.

I spent last year building a social video annotation app called Aech that never really caught on, but captured interest from a couple people that wanted the core annotation technology for business.

Mindstamp is the result of those conversations and six months of development work. It lets you enrich your videos with interactive notes (text, audio, video), questions, and personalization in just a few seconds before sharing them with your customers, clients, or teams.

Video is growing rapidly but is still largely a one-way, static asset. Mindstamp aims to change that by providing an interaction level on top for both creator and viewer to exchange ideas and gather feedback. We're just getting started but think there's a lot of room to innovate here.

Built 100% by me with Rails, VueJS, Vuetify, and Heroku ️

I'd love to hear your constructive feedback (please be nice, first real product shipped) and am happy to answer any questions you might have. And yes, I'm going to make a better demo video - it's just a placeholder for now.

Thanks for reading!

Great work Brett!! You may refer to yourself as the "awkward dude", I'd say the "authentic dude" ;) A project like this comes across much better when you get to see the real person behind it.

This is a cool project and a very clear landing page.

One thing I felt was a little jarring while working through the stamps in the demo video was the audio completely cutting out when a question is posed. Perhaps having some 'standby' music would help in that way, or even just fading the audio in and out when the pause happens.

Spotify do this on play / pause.

Great stuff, and good luck with the project!

Really slick - great landing page and I love the demo. Clearly demonstrates what the product does, and I can certainly see the value.

Small nitpick: IDK if intentional, but it seems that you're not quite sanitizing input. I Added an annotation with <script>console.log("Hello")</script> and it printed to the console as I viewed the video.

Hey, I think the part there about the data the users added being saved to your mindstamp dashboard is good, but I think a lot of companies (especially the company I just finished a couple years consulting at and whom I'm going to forward this to) would like to pay for that data to be available to their scripts on the page.

The context I am thinking of specifically is guided help systems in which you want a response from a customer before showing some more video or maybe even switching to another video.

If you think you would be willing to add that kind of functionality in to your product I can tell them when I pass it on to them and set you up to talk.

I have some constructive criticism.

The pricing is over the top for what is just timestamps + (any interaction you can think of) on a video. And it's a subscription model, which is an extremely optimistic pricing model.

While I believe there is untapped potential for clever video time-stamping (I've worked a bit on this stuff myself), most of the time viewers don't want their video interrupted. Nor do video producers want their videos interrupted due to the fact timing, editing and pace is usually important to a video presentation.

Asking "what is your name" or inviting other input at key points could be very useful, but not when it depends on being a member of something called mindstamp. That's more than friction, that's a brick wall.

Tutorial videos, or complex "paths" for say an interactive story involving choice, could be a use case, but we're now starting to get excited about the scraps on offer after most people have said no thanks. In saying that, there could be plenty of money in the scraps if it's a niche, specific application. Such as tutorial videos, e-learning, evaluative videos, induction day training, and so on. But again... the subscription model... ouch.

the idea is interesting but there are way too many dialog prompts to get anything done.

I personally find very little value in this type of video application for collaboration. A good video presenter should know exactly what questions an audience has, before the questions asked. When you have a webinar or video, inside of tools like skype, that's what those chat tools are for. It allows for asynchronous communication on a predictable level, unobscured and easy for anyone to grasp immediately. Twitch / youtube-live are also options too.

If you want to make something I would really want -> build a app that allows you to take timestamps on youtube videos similar to udemy, but unobtrusive. Youtube has a predictable time duration on each video and time stamps, so this should be possible via a userscript and or chrome extension, with data input going to another server / called from the extension. You can opt to do localstorage but longterm that data should be stored elsewhere.

This is exactly what a product like Edpuzzle does for educational purposes. https://edpuzzle.com/

Nice job Brett. Logged in just to make a suggestion. If you haven't considered the enterprise angle - I can see this being useful in creating enterprise video content. Specifically for making e-learning content and such similar things. You don't know how much this space lacks in proper tooling. Having said that, I can see some challenges if you have considered or are considering. I can shed some light if you like. Or if not, best of luck =) Useful!

Interesting idea. A good use case might be for video tutorials, where the video could auto-pause and ask when the user has completed the previous step. I find myself pausing tutorials videos constantly. Another idea might to build logic in, so that the video asks whether you're following along and will want pauses, or if you're just watching to learn and won't want pauses between steps.

Pretty cool. Does it handle multiple resolutions of the same video (Eg: 1080p 720p 480p 360p ) ?

Awesome project, will follow the development. Thanks for posting, you got all my upvotes!

Interesting idea! Is there any way to customize what the user sees next in the video based upon how they answer a question?

Great idea for some types of content but also a bit frustrating as someone who doesn't want to "engage"

Very neat! Good job!