I decided to start Grain b/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't see coming when we started.
Happy to answer any questions and thanks for the support.
We bounced around on really bad names like Radical (as in transparency/candor), Arthur (everyone has a seat at the roundtable), Zebra (literally just a placeholder)...
But landed on Grain because it means something about our product. Grains are little pieces that can accumulate to become something meaningful. Thats what our video highlight clips are all about. Little nuggets that come from somewhere else but can stand on their own. We get most excited when thinking about what can be made when you combine the "grains" together.
Also easy to say, a real word, 5 letters and the .co was cheap and nobody else has claimed the mindshare around the word. Today we start working on our SEO game :)
If not, we will be working on building out support for windows /linux in coming months [we use electron] as well as other VC providers.
The bootstrap problem to get early teams before you have credibility is crazy difficult. It takes time to do it well and with authenticity.
I'm digging the integration features, e.g. slack, imessage
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.
Good luck Grain team!
We actually spent 9 months building a prior version of Grain that was basically a Google Doc w/ Zoom integration & time stamps. Ultimately, we threw that version away (kill your darlings as they say). People told us that what you described was the bigger problem b/c it was too much work to unlock a stream of recorded video w/ traditional post-hoc video editing tools.
But if it's easy enough to break the best content down into just the good parts that live on their own, independent of the parent recording file... well that unlocks some interesting things you can do to combine those blocks and share them in feeds w/ teams.
But it all comes down the the quality of the content you make with the tool. So that's where we're focused first.
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.
I can usually cut down an hour talk/call. to around 5-20 minutes of good high impact content.
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.
I've got the manual workflow down where this is something I don't do every day.. but several times a week is fine. Editing ain't pretty, but it is effective.
Since the lockdown, I have been working on the other end of the "pipeline"... the INPUT to Zoom. After a couple of false starts (OBS, CamTwist, Wirecast...). I ended up implementing Ecamm Studio Pro....
Looking forward to exploring your tool....
It’s super labor intensive but once you get in the flow it’s surprisingly easy/quick. Especially if you’re okay cutting 10h down to 6h instead of 4h.
And yes it makes you know the material incredibly well. Way better even than the prep for and creating of the raw stuff.
I use the clips so that others can gain from the kernals of wisdom those clips provide... without having to commit to some portion of an hour to find the kernal themselves.
Saves everyone time and enforces compliance to decisions made )
Also, of course, by manually editing down a deeply technical discussion from an hour to 20 minutes helps me REALLY listen and understand what the speaker is saying....and so it also helps me to continue improve my knowledge...
I've got to say, that for meetings big/important enough where you've got someone dedicated to taking notes/minutes, this seems like it could be a really effective and compelling way of sharing meeting highlights/takeaways/fun bits with a broader audience, people who couldn'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.)
But if this works well, hopefully Zoom buys them, and we'll expect to see Google and Microsoft build their own versions.
You're exactly right wrt the dedicated real-time annotator. We created a information transfer framework for our internal product development/design that has helped us to see that for our product to work (highlight clips that don't suck)... you need a dedicated person who's job it is to annotate the content of the video stream in real time (aka taking notes). It's too complex to do well with AI... let the humans drive the car for a while if you know what I mean :)
Our core use cases so far have focused on where this dedicated notetaker is already the case and over time we can automate the annotation process and expand to more use cases without a dedicated notetaker.
The cool thing we've seen since releasing the ability to take collaborative notes w/ your team is that the annotating just kinda happens naturally... people jot down things they thing are important to the mutual benefit of everyone on the team (in the meeting and not).
Our transcription will naturally get better over time but it doesn't have to be perfect b/c it's a means to an end in Grain. (creating/trimming video clips)
Even perfect transcripts are still terrible to read most of the time b/c the dynamic nature of spoken dialogue just doesn't translate well across mediums.
Google "Media Richness Theory" if you want to go down the rabbit hole on this.
Two teams at Slack currently use Grain.
Behzod runs research and has been tweeting about his use of Grain a decent amount lately: https://twitter.com/beh_zod/status/1250900606073442305 https://twitter.com/beh_zod/status/1248740029901332481
Here's Jason from Podium: https://twitter.com/jregb/status/1250995517724585985
Here's Dustin from Lambda School (not one of the logos): https://twitter.com/dustint314/status/1250948975202426880
But the actual answer to your question of how is that it took a long time to build something they wanted to use. We've been building a version of Grain for about 15 months now, about 6 months on the product we just released and 9 months on a version we threw away.
Eventually we built up word or mouth of happy users that refer other teams. It's a grind to get real teams to adopt anything but it is possible with continued effort.
Hopefully this is a catapult or an entry point. All the best, regardless.
No doubt we're aware of the analogs and risks. Have spent a collective month in Zoom calls with other platform founders to understand the risks but feeling really good about Zoom as a GTM platform partner. Have mentioned in other threads but there's long-sequence of strategic moves at play and this is the first of them.
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 :)
As in oral-only societies, information becomes stored only in minds. After video meetings, no recorded information remains, so let's add recording of videos. Recorded videos are unsearchable and poorly seekable, so let's add voice recognition.
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 "trusted by great teams".
If anything you should be pivoting to support as many of the other popular video conferencing apps out there.
The concerns are 100% valid, I'm glad to see them finally surfaced and addressed. I still like our odds w/ Zoom relative to WebRTC, their team is a proven mammoth. My son was on a Zoom call for school this morning... likely some PR relativity of the past week.
It's a two horse race at this point Zoom or WebRTC. Most start ups choose to build on WebRTC and focus on new workflows, we chose to build on Zoom to add the most meaningful leverage we could think of (data utility) to existing workflows.
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's inspiring to see other projects working in the same direction
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/paragraph.
I'm struggling to see how a video clip can deliver a similar summarisation, unless someone has vocally summarised at the end for the clip.
Grain is best for that punchy quote you want to share mid-moment or for the summary 30 second wrap-up at the end.
We have changed our dialogue to include these at the end of convos b/c that way it's easy to summarize conclusions and next steps to document and share with others. Most good meetings have these anyway.
- Does Grain require access to the Zoom API to work? (Is there some other screen capture / scraping at work?) Any known issues/restrictions with using this with enterprise Zoom accounts?
- Can I record a Zoom meeting I was invited to, or just ones where I own the invite?
- Yes, the only way to log-into Grain is with your Zoom account. It's been really seamless, they did a great job setting up those permissions.
- Sort of. You can take notes if 1) It's your Zoom link or 2) It's someone on your team who is also a Grain user's Zoom link. There isn't currently a way to take notes across workspaces b/c we want the meeting host to be in control for privacy reasons.
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/paragraph.
...a third-party company that can kill your business at any time (see for example what happened with, twitter, facebook etc).
But yes, this was def the #1 objection of VCs when we raised our seed round. Fortunately we got others to believe that the first move we just launched is just one of many in a strategy sequence. Time will tell.
