Launch HN: Hypercontext (YC S21) – Meeting notes, actions, and OKRs in one app
Most managers get promoted into their role with no training. “Oh you’re a good engineer? Great! Now manage a team of engineers and stop coding”. They’re largely leading with trial-and-error tactics. The good ones are reflective and learn, and many eventually read books on best practices and frameworks that can help them. Our insight is that it’s possible to build some of these good frameworks into a workflow so every manager can get them by default, similarly to how a good software framework lets you not have to hand-roll all the boilerplate code, so you can focus on the business logic. We think it’s time managers stop winging it (worst case) or hand rolling their management frameworks (best case) in Google Docs and Moleskin notebooks and start importing frameworks that solve the basics for them.
Previously, Graham and I have been co-founders for 10 years together. Our last startup grew to ~40 employees. When we became full-time managers we were shocked at the lack of tooling that existed for general management work. This was where the idea for Hypercontext came from. We started building tools and systems to help us fill the gaps (mainly in Google Sheets/Docs/Forms). We shared them with friends and they were loved.
Personally, I stumbled through management in my first startup. I didn’t talk about goals. I didn’t share candid feedback. I wasn’t clear or consistent. I thought I knew how to do other people’s jobs. I learned the hard way every single time. And so did all of my peers. The only way to save a fellow manager from that pain was by sharing personal tips or recommending books. We thought there must be a better way.
Hypercontext starts before the meeting: connecting to your existing meetings and helping you and your team build a collaborative agenda and show up prepared. During the meeting, often overlayed on a Google Meet: we help you take notes and action items, and email them out automatically for you. After: ML runs over your notes and generates insights about management blindspots. We then suggest questions/conversation starters for your next meeting to help to resolve them.
Finally, we’ve built a powerful goaling tool, complete with the largest library of goal/OKR examples on the internet (free here, broken up by role: https://hypercontext.com/goal-examples), that helps you collaborate, document, and discuss long-term goals every meeting before the urgent agenda topic.
Founders, CEOs, execs use our app all week to manage their job—mainly through their 1:1 and team meetings. We’re specifically helpful for folks who are doing a lot of context switching throughout their day and need to offload the “remember to talk to people about this” part of their brain.
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[ 5.0 ms ] story [ 124 ms ] threadRegarding shared meeting notes, I think the killer feature that would make gdocs obsolete is auto-suggesting canceling a 1on1 or other meeting if there are no items to discuss. This removes the awkward "Hey do you still want to chat?" conversations and makes it a blameless way to get time back.
Definitely something I think about though.
They're a bit more "sell to HR" focused and we're more "biuld for the end user" focused - eg: They don't have goals but do have workplace analytics
Since then, we've been slowly adding to the library, from new roles to new goals for existing roles and it's currently sitting at about 230 goals. If there are any roles that you think we're missing, we're all ears!
Most of the initial goals were contributed by our network so it was built pretty quickly.
Also known as the Peter Principle.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_principle
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I agree. However, the average new manager goes 10yrs into their role before they get _any_ training. So I'm not sure if they're at fault here or if they've been setup to fail.
I'm sure most workers would be considered incompetent if they were put into roles where they had no experience or training.
Just takes a lot of trail and error to learn.
- Hera: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27771091
- Superpowered: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26425318
Superpowered has a bunch of similar concepts - however their launch claims that meeting events won't be the focus forever. Moving to github and slack soon. So we'll see.
There are a couple others in the batch that will be launching soon that are loosely competitive.
I think it's part of a broader recognition that people who "live out of their calendars" weren't having an easy 2020.
For what it's worth, we think meetings are the means to the end not the end, not the end itself.
> Most managers get promoted into their role with no training. “Oh you’re a good engineer? Great! Now manage a team of engineers and stop coding”.
I wish this was true. Well, these days people want Engineering Managers to code and manage plus also on the side win a Nobel Prize.
Views on "stop coding" have been changing. https://randsinrepose.com/archives/technicality/
But also from my end, this leaves me pretty unmotivated. I've been working on an mvp to launch my own startup the past month, and today I find out it already exists in your product.
Happy to build this space with you, together. Competition is good for customers and ultimately that's who I'm serving.
Email me brennan at hypercontext.com and I'd be happy to collaborate.
ultimately decided there's just too many competitors. my only gripe with all of these is that they're heavily subscription based/pay to use monthly, etc. i want something more personal that i can just purchase for like $10-20 (more like an app on my mac that i can just use forever)
my other gripe is that i don't want to have to onboard my entire team onto it. i want to only use it myself as like a reference guide for the health gauge of my team. i dont need them all inputting their OKRs into these products
[0] https://www.15five.com/
[1] https://www.small-improvements.com/
Also, we'll only charge you for additional users if you a) invite them and b) they sign in and become active.
So definitely can stay at $5/m and use it as a personal tool for as long as you want to. It's on the product to convince you your life can be significantly easier through inviting people, not me
Given that most managers are relatively new, I’m still hoping you have vast success :)
But there’s also a key bit of feedback in there - you might want to ensure there’s a good solo experience in there, too. That will also help you get into entrenched IT departments at large companies - you might not get the sale to the whole company off the bat, but you can capture key internal voices (if they can run your app without security concerns and off the corporate network)
Either way, good luck. Managers deserve all the support they can get, and engineers deserve better management.
The main value for experienced managers is a) the ability to offload the mental energy of remembering to bring something up in a meeting, b) the sheer volume of direct reports that need to becared for, and for organizers c) some of the best practice busy work that accumulates value over time (eg: sending notes after the meeting). Actually have quite a few CEOs who have adopted
My only nit is we don't want to mediate a human interaction in app. Instead we want to encourage human interaction by removing as much of the the non-human interaction as we can.
What was the thought process there?
https://hypercontext.com/blog/news/soapbox-rebrand-hypercont...
1. Used sign in with Google
2. Immediately presented with calendar read/write permissions, declined.
3. Went back and signed up via email.
4. Was told that an org already exists but no details (did I make it earlier? Can’t tell.)
5. Told 13 days of trial remaining (was an org created yesterday or does it just round down to 13 as soon as one second has passed?)
6. Only one active user, me.
7. Create workspace is grayed out and can’t see how to actually create any content in the app (does it need calendars connected first?)
It’s promising in concept. Posting this in hopes it’ll help, not just to complain. I’ll ask for a trial reset in a few days, assuming I really was the first user to create our org so have that ability.
HN readers seem like the best folks to beta test a product on as they can give a lot of actionable feedback and have context on what good systems should look like.
And we typically like helping fellow hackers/entrepreneurs/etc.
Using HN for feedback is pretty core to YC’s value for batch companies and has been going on for quite some time
Founders get actionable feedback and advice on their projects with contributions weighted heavily from developers and tech enthusiasts who know what they’re talking about (even if sometimes a bit ornery). Commenters get to learn about new projects before anywhere else on the internet and provide QA in return. It’s all win-win.
Also: Why would I want another tool to keep track of tasks? I can assign tasks via $issuetracker, Google Docs, gtmhub and probably a couple of other tools my employer is using.
I'll see how far a Google Doc per direct report will carry me.
It looks like you guys have some ML in the product already so have you ever thought about using it to generate suggestions for writing goals? We've been doing this to generate suggestions for phrasing constructive feedback, and the suggestions are surprisingly good.
Re - ML on feedback: Customers/users haven't taken us there, yet, anyways.
Would love to jam more, if you're open to it? brennan at hypercontext.com?
You run into some weird pricing this way. For example, 250 users on the pro plan is $1,000/mo while 251 is $220.88.
So, the first 100 users are $5.60/u/m or $560/m, if annual (to keep numbers consistent).
101 users would be $564/m as only the 101st user would be $4/m on the annual plan.
We stole this model from jira.
How would you go about explaining our pricing to a peer/what would you change about the page to make it more clear?
Thanks in advance :)
It seems to be a subject that trips a lot of people up. It's really common to see people talk about their marginal tax rate as if it is their effective tax rate. "I pay 24% in taxes and make $175K/year" - Not really though, you paid 24% on ~$4K of income, but 10% on the first $19,750, 12% on the income from $19,751 to $80,250, etc. Your marginal tax rate is 24% as that's what you'll pay on the next dollar, but your effective tax rate on all income earned was actually 14% (or whatever it actually is, just a loose example).
In your case, the discount is so significant that I'd think you'd want to showcase that. Maybe a slider to adjust the number of users and show the dollar amount of the discount as well as the total percent saved, which will continually grow as you increase the bucket of users in that lowest bracket?
Or in that FAQ you could give an example of a 300 person workspace and show how the calculation pencils out. Having to do math to figure out the ballpark cost of the product isn't great though, so if the info is public (ie you don't have to contact sales) then you should probably make it super easy to get to.
Just some ideas. You never know, everyone else might get it right away and I could have just been slow on it. My brain definitely went to doing rough math and thinking about how weird the pricing is at different user counts though!
But yeah we've certainly had a slider in the past with a calculator so could certainly build that back into the page! I'm 100% with you on not making people do the math, especially with the pricing plan/tiered approach we've taken.
Pre-business plan it was super neat to test out what user number was most effective to show on the initial calculator view. Plus it was a great edition for the CS team when sending potential customers ball parks of plan costs.
But this was incredibly helpful feedback so thank you so much. :) If we get the calculator up and running soon I'll be sure to send it your way!
I'll be sure to ping you once it's live. Alternatively... would love your feedback before it's live if you're up for it :)
hiba at hypercontext.com. We can even loop in our UX designer who is also the marketing designer. :)
Lmk!! Would really love to connect
You don't need to sell to Netflix to get their logo on your homepage, you just need to convince one person with an @netflix.com email to sign up. Much easier :)
Us coders also wanna create and join meetings easily :)