genevpd

Hey HN,

Remeet is a fundamentally different approach to meetings for distributed engineering teams, unlike anything else you've seen/used before.

To give you some context, here's the evolution of asynchronous communication tools:

Gen 1: mail

Gen 2: email (digital replica of Gen 1)

Gen 3: thousands of collaboration tools that create highly optimized experiences that weren't imaginable in a pre-digital age

And here's the evolution of synchronous communication tools:

Gen 1: in-person meetings

Gen 2: skype/webex/zoom meetings (digital replica of Gen 1)

Gen 3: disappointing lack of progress

It's hard to believe, but most of the new meeting tools are in the Gen 2 category (e.g., virtual offices).

We've made great progress over the last couple of years to optimize synchronous meeting experiences for distributed engineering teams, and there are numerous success stories.

Please check our website to see how it works: https://www.remeet.com/

I'd be happy to answer any questions here.

Cheers,

Gene

Just curious what you folks think about the idea.

Meetter has been in early access for the last year with a small number of users, and now we’re ready to open it up to new users. Most users report that Meetter saves them more than 8 hours per month on. Think of it like getting an extra two weeks off each year.

Hey, do you agree with this?

Do you think your manager will get this?

Hi All,

I'd like to thank everyone for the feedback and for trying meetter this week.

We will be closing demo account this week. You are still more than welcome to sign-up for early access here: https://www.Meetter.ai

Good luck!

Gene

Give it a try: https://i.gyazo.com/d848d0bcdedcb4046b644613efbc95ed.gif

> This is what annoys me about Slack's "we remove all meetings and email" approach. You can have no full meetings using Slack, instead you invite everyone to a channel and have 100 micro-meetings of a minute all day long that constantly interrupt your flow and could be solved easily with one short 15 minute meeting.

Unlike the slack approach, with Meetter micro meetings are clustered inside predefined hours during the day to avoid distraction. You can set it as the last hour at the end of the work day and get 7 hours of no distraction. Also, if there are multiple topics with the same group of people - these will be merged into one within that hour, say if for some reason you have six five minutes long topics with other two people - you will get one productive thirty minutes to talk.

This is simple if you are in a position of power within the organization. For most makers, this is not the case, so people end-up with meetings where most organizers belive are good and most participants believe are bad, BUT ALMOST NOBODY SPEAKS UP!

With Meetter if someone is a CEO of a company and wants to cut the costs on time wasted because of meetings, this will be a lot faster to achieve than just educating whole company on how to run meetings.

Ah, I see what you are suggesting. This indeed makes sense and may be possible not so far down the road when we expose APIs.

For now, it is possible to implement the same workflow with the current version of Meetter just by asking someone to check task tracker for blockers about 30 minutes before the Meetter hour and manually create topics.

Thanks for the suggestion!

Yes, I have personally struggled a lot. About 5+ years of experience working in a highly distributed company where meetings for me and many colleagues take more than 50% of the time. There a lot of advice out there on how to improve things, but it takes time to master. The other problem is that it is not something that only you need to learn, all your peers have to and that takes time. There are also limits to what you can do with existing technology.

Compare the difficulty of doing project task tracking in MS Word versus JIRA/Trello/Basecamp.

With meetings, we are still at MS Word stage and Meetter is a JIRA/Trello for meetings.

Happy to hear that there are other companies solving the same problem!

We are working on Slack integration too, it will be possible to create & schedule Meetter topics right from Slack or from Teams.

Love it! :-)

That is true that meeting productivity highly depends on meeting organizers. That role starts with figuring out if the meeting is needed, finding a time, inviting people who own the decision, etc. Not that many people good at it.

But, what happens if we try to de-centralize the organizers? What if anybody can play a role of organizer of much smaller meetings (10 mins vs 60 mins)? What if there is a limit on how many meetings can be scheduled a day (1 hour vs 8 hours)? What if time reservations are not based on the first-in rule, but dynamic and based on the priority?

Thanks for your suggestion on landing page!

The problem we see is that companies in their transition from physical office to a virtual and distributed workplace carried over all the meeting habits that are outdated.

We believe there is no longer need in standing meetings with fixed audiences.

With Meetter, you are basically setting your weekly meetings budget for the whole company and let topics compete for that time. This is a lot different from what is happening today: meetings fight for all the available time on everyone's calendar.

Meetter hours are not finalized until 15 minutes before the start. High priority, smaller and shorter topics win. Meetter makes all meetings about what they should be: about solving problems, not about socializing & sharing updates - there are less expensive ways to do that.

Can tool change the culture? We are optimists and believe they can.

Thanks for bringing this up! One thing that we are not yet sure how much value the concept of daily/weekly standing meetings will add to the teams using Meetter for most of their meetings.

I feel like many meeting habits and practices are evolved from the physical office environment that has limitations that are not present in the virtual world.

Btw, check out this talk from Al Pittampali at Google https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mn-q529ExFw One of the keystone habits he is advocating is "Make all standing meetings tentative"

Thanks for the feedback! If you have at least one hour of overlap - then you can just use that daily hour for Meetter. That is what we do within our team.

If that is a bit more complicated like: US, Europe & Australia. You may need to setup hours on 3 different intersections and people can decline those that don’t work for them and Meetter will use that information for scheduling.

This is so true. Looking at recent developments in calendar software - it is almost all about generating more meetings easier, and not much about protecting from the distraction. Meeting software companies - pricing models tiered based on duration and size of the meetings. So it will require 180 degree u-turn for them to catch up.

Great suggestion! We never thought about such a use case so as of now by default you will be also added to that meeting, but we can easily tweak it.

So Meetter can do alomost everything you described. I will let you know when we have tweaked it.

Note: Meetter has built-in video meeting experience with recording & transcribe by default. You will see ‘Join Now’ button on the agenda about 5 minutes before the Meetter hour starts.

If you would like to try it with your team in your own Meetter account with own hours schedule, just email the name of the organization to <my first name>@meetter.ai or simply sign-up from the landing page. I promise to respond with new account URL quickly.

Appreciate any feedback! Gene Podolyak

Several people suggested to buy both, in that case, which one you will make primary and other for redirect?

We were thinking to get target companies list first and then use linkedin search to find companies where we have good 2nd degree connections.

To provide some more context, we are searching for our first private beta batch and we have've got some good leads from 1st degree connections, but we may exhaust them soon. With the number of 2nd & 3rd degree connections it is much harder to target the right people/companies.

Knowing our state, would you still advice us to invest in content vs exploiting 2nd & 3d degree connections to get first customers?

Thanks for your help!