This article was crafted by us and sponsored by our friends at Grain.
We’re Zoom users here at Product Hunt and, humblebrag, we’re quite good at it. As a fully remote team, we have to be. Our meetings are structured, we use chat and mute responsibility, and we’ve enjoyed awesome team-building experiences like visiting a virtual farm sanctuary.
While we may be pros, we have one experience in common with just about every Zoom user: amnesia. In other words, forgetting what happened in a meeting. It’s frustrating and even a bit heartbreaking. How much potential is lost with unearthed information as soon as the meeting ends?
Surfacing What Matters Most
The truth is, as a human being, your working memory (think of it as your messy desktop) has a limited capacity to hold information temporarily. Even with written meeting notes, it can be hard to remember what you meant when you put them down. Yes, Zoom has a record button but rarely does a soul have the time to go back to listen to a 60-minute recording or read a long transcription.
At the height of the pandemic last year, Grain launched on Product Hunt with features that changed all of that. With a few clicks, Grain made it possible to surface and share your best nuggets of insight and information from your meetings.
That’s an elevator pitch. A deeper look at the features shows you how flexible pulling, manipulating, and sharing that content is. With Grain, all your meeting data is accessible with text-first video editing. The implications of that are huge.
Sales teams can take live notes and highlight excerpts from their transcriptions for CRMs. Marketers can quickly cut a short testimonial ad. Developers can grab a unique link for a video snippet and drop it into Slack. Customer support teams can tag searchable snippets to make it easier to sort through information for later calls.
Now Grain has launched its biggest update in 6 months. Co-founder Mike Adams explained the new features (you can read the full list here):
- Clip In Real-Time: Caption and clip the most important moments.
- Story Creator: Drag and drop clips together to compress the best parts of your meetings into one summary video.
- Workflow Integrations: Save even more time with templates for your favorite apps like easy task creation for Asana and quick send of insight clips to Slack.
Early adopters from the Product Hunt community have picked up Grain and never looked back.
“Real-time clipping from Zoom... made me realize: days of note-taking are over when every meeting gets boiled down to the few clips/points that matter.” - Scott Belsky
“So many great conversations were forever lost because I can't take good notes while talking or trying to pay attention while the other person is talking. Being able to flag important parts of a conversation, then copy the transcript or share a short video clip is absolutely mind-blowing.” - David Barnard
“We've been able to capture, share - and most importantly find - the essential insights from Zoom calls.” - Todd Patton
Content Accessibility
With the Creator Renaissance in high gear, accessibility and flexible content is more important than ever.
More than 50 million people consider themselves to be influencers, according to a recent article by SignalFire. More consumers are relying on these influencers to produce regularly with millions tuning in across online channels. Creators are getting burnt out.
“You’re completely self-employed, and it’s not like you can continuously make the same work. You have to evolve and adapt,” influencer Jack Innanen told the New York Times.
Sean McCabe is a content creator and educator. His blog, courses, and podcasts help makers learn how to create and scale their content. One strategy he’s passionate about is repurposing content. Repurposing content transforms makers into content machines with less overthinking and more production.
That’s why McCabe has been a Grain evangelist since discovering it. He recently dug into how much potential your content really has when you have the tools to re-shape it endlessly and shared some of his favorite use cases for getting the most out of your content.
- Client said good things about your service on a strategy call? Instant testimonial video.
- Customer shared user feedback on a support call? Instant bug report.
- Team member explained a new way to work? Instant tutorial.
- Let's say you made 10 "highlights" (video clips) from your meeting. Click a single button to combine those 10 highlights into a "Story" (like an Instagram story!)
The Product Hunt content team is switching from standard Zoom recordings to using Grain for maker interviews ourselves and we’re excited to start radically increasing the amount, and quality, of usable content soon. We thoroughly enjoy the time we share with the thought leaders, creators, and innovators in our community but sharing stories traditionally takes a lot of time. From the initial interview to blog or tweet, content goes from makers’ mouths through a series of steps while transcripts are re-read, clips are cut, shares are made, and approvals happen.
Grain is cutting down all that work and effort even making it more enjoyable. It’s a thrill when you are able to pull a highlight from a conversation that you know will provide value and joy to the community.
As more creators start to use Grain and as the company expands (Zoom is just the start), we can expect more use cases to stretch the limitations of what we ever thought was possible with virtual meetings.
Global research company Gartner predicts that 75% of conversations at work will be recorded and analyzed by 2025. The ability to capture moments from these recordings in real-time and turn them into systems of knowledge, intelligence, and content has implications across verticals and for consumers as well as companies. From researchers to journalists, real-time curation and sharing has the power to improve our shared understanding of common to complex problems by making information accessible and visible in an instant.