Thank you for being a valued member of the Broadcast community. We genuinely appreciate your support and the trust you’ve placed in us.

We are reaching out to inform you of an important update. After careful consideration, we have made the difficult decision to discontinue our meeting notes product.

Here’s what this means for you:

Effective Today (September 19th):

• Refunds Processed: We have refunded all paid subscriptions as of today. You should see the refund reflected in your account shortly. Please reach out if you don't.

September 30, 2024 :

• Recording Disabled: The ability to record new meetings will be disabled on September 30th.

October 30th, 2024

• Access to Past Meeting Notes: You will continue to have access to your existing meeting notes and recordings until October 30th, 2024.

Data Export

• Download Your Data: You can download your videos and notes directly from your Broadcast account.

• Additional Assistance: If you need help exporting your data, please fill out our Data Export Request Form

• Support Available: If you have questions or need assistance during this transition, our support team is here to help. Contact us at support@broadcast.com or reply to this email.

We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause and wish we had better news. Your support has meant a lot to us, and we’re grateful to have had the opportunity to serve you.

Team Broadcast

We had a big February at Broadcast. We shipped the ability to view videos, edit transcripts & summaries, the ability to have the bots auto-join on Zoom, and an end-of-week digest!

We’ve also shipped quality-of-life improvements like improvements to the “upcoming meetings” page. We also have a pro version coming soon where you can customize how the bots look inside calls!

Videos

You can now view videos directly on the transcripts page for external meetings. The videos have a 7-day retention period. In the coming weeks, we plan to give you more control over video retention, the ability to enable videos for internal meetings, and the option to turn them off entirely.

Editing Summaries

We've added the ability to edit summaries and their associated transcripts, as well as the option to add your own custom follow-ups. This should help you refine and personalize your meeting notes.

We're also looking into allowing summary reviews before they're sent out to teammates.

Beta: Weekly Digest

To help you stay on top of numerous meetings and prepare for the week ahead, we've launched the first version of our Weekly Digest feature. This digest provides an overview of the previous week's meetings. We'd appreciate your feedback on how we can improve this feature.

Auto-Joining Meetings

You can now connect Broadcast to your Zoom account, enabling auto-joining directly from your settings page. This should make joining meetings more convenient.

We're continually working on enhancing Broadcast based on user feedback. If you have any suggestions or ideas, feel free to share them with us.

Thanks, The Broadcast Team

Link to Loom

New Features:

• Smart Meeting Type Selection: Automatic categorisation of your meetings

• Auto-Join All New Meetings: Set whether you’d like Broadcast to join new external, new internal, or all meetings automatically

Improvements:

• Improvements to Sections: Clearer, more focused meeting summaries

• Enhanced Dark Mode: Readability issues of summary emails in Dark Mode are now resolved h/t @pitdesai

Bug Fixes:

• Fixed Summary Section Ordering: 'Summary' consistently appears first

• Resolved Email Bullets Display: Improved formatting for clearer reading

Other Changes:

• Increased Meeting Notes Access: Every participant receives the summaries post-meeting

Customer Quotes:

Here’s a few things that customers have told us about Broadcast this past week!

Coming Soon Voting

We can do a lot of heavy lifting for you based on just meetings and meeting notes. We’re looking to bring some of what we’ve been working on very soon. To that end, we’ve added a tab in the sidebar where you can vote for what you’d be most excited about. Plus, you can vote multiple times

Improvements:

• Updated recorder name in Zoom/Meet & sender name for email summaries

• Improved display and organization of follow-up actions

• Upgraded handling of quotes in transcript completions and LLM output errors

• Added meeting start times on the transcript page

Bug Fixes:

• Fixed readability of summary email when in dark mode

• Resolved issues with meeting notes summary permissions being too restrictive

• Fixed a bug affecting how non-recurring meetings showed up on the home page

• Improved error handling and messaging throughout the app

• Ensured ‘summary’ is always the first section in outputs

Other Changes:

• Lifted restrictions on non-work email signups

• Now sending meeting notes to all participants, regardless of organisation membership

Cute puppy: Hudson

Connor got a new puppy last week which only means he deserves to be in this changelog. Here’s Hudson in all his glory!

Now to tell you a little bit more:

1. ❓ Why Broadcast?
2. ✨ How's it different?
3. 🔮 What's next?

1. ❓ Why Broadcast?

Over the last few months, we've been rethinking our approach to AI and automation in the workplace to give you time back and help you operate with less overhead. We're excited to release the first part of that vision: AI Meeting Notes

60% of the work that managers do is work about work, aka meta work that includes meetings, scheduling, synthesizing, and writing updates. Given the amount of time spent in meetings, we are starting there!

With Broadcast, you get:

• ✏️ Automated Summaries: AI does the heavy lifting so that you can stay in the moment.

• ↔️ Direct Sync with Project Tools: Seamlessly push action items to where they need to be

• 🔎 AI Transparency: We demystify AI decisions for trust and clarity

• 🔨 Decision Tracking: Keep a clear record of what was said and decide

• 🗯️ Workflow Integration: Seamlessly fits into your team’s day-to-day rituals

• 📰  Weekly Reports: Personalized for you at the end of every week

2. ✨ How’s it different?

1. Tailored: Crafted with managers in mind

2. Pricing: FREE to use. We will eventually charge for the work we impact post-meeting

3. Privacy: We aim to delete original audio & video recordings after 90 days, keeping only summaries. B*tch about a colleague before they joined? We’ll edit that out too!

3. 🔮 What's next?

We're starting with meeting notes, and we have a few exciting workflows which will start to take on some of the work

- AI Copilot: Let us attend meetings when you're double-booked 👀
- Planning: Drafting priorities based on what happened the previous week
- Prep Work: Record your 1:1s, upload your rubric, and an initial evaluation. We’ll save you time by preparing your initial packet.

About 7ish months ago we moved on from the automated updates product to building a few other products (standups & changelog) which we’ve since moved on from as well. The bulk of our time was spent on Broadcast 1.0 and this post is a brief reflection of that journey.

This blog post covers 3 topics:

1. Product: Automated updates

2. Promising ideas: Split View and Smart Blocks

3. Why we moved on: Horizontal product challenges and frequency of usage

Product

Our north star has always been and will continue to be focused on bringing the power of AI and automation to your workplace to give you time back and achieve the company’s mission with less overhead.

The place we picked to get started on this journey was a place of personal pain and discovered pain and talked to hundreds of users at companies of various stages in the first year. Not everyone looks forward to writing their updates, collecting parts of it from their colleagues, figuring out what happened, etc. but they all admitted it was an important part of their job, especially if they were a manager.

They were not alone! Updates are how people find out what’s happening on other teams, drive accountability on their own, and know the status of projects.

How information travels is critical to the success of every single company and many have talked in depth about it.

• Stripe goes in-depth on this topic: Email Transparency @ Stripe circa 2013

• Shopify built an internal tool called Vault: Here’s a video walkthrough by Jean Michel Lemiuex their CTO at the time

• Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia talks about how he receives short weekly emails from 50+ direct reports as a way to manage his company

I like the quote below as an encapsulation.

“Perhaps the CEO’s most important operational responsibility is designing and implementing the communication architecture for her company.” - Ben Horowitz via Gokul Rajaram’s blogpost on Communication Architectures LINK

Communication and coordination is a lubricant of capitalism. And it often it happens in patterns and rhythms and we wanted to own those via an automated updates product.

So we focused on automating the meta work (collecting updates, sending reminders) and automatically pulling in information from other tools that can be used.

Our product’s flow was:

1. Create a recurring update →

2. Set a template for people and apps to fill out →

3. Get reminders for the next editions →

4. Prefilled content →

5. Edit it →

6. Ship and share over email and Slack

7. People now know what’s happening!

While we made the entire process about 2-3x better in terms of time saved and annoyances had. This would’ve been sufficient to start generating revenue if we were competing against a fixed other tool but for a workflow that people have in docs, slides, and Slack that’s been hacked together, it turned out to be not enough. Get stuck had too much work to do, it wasn’t 100% automated yet!

Promising Ideas

We’d love to see more of these ideas in other tools!

1. Side by Side View

You’re always pulling information from other sources when writing updates. Whether it’s a previous update, somebody else’s update, or information from a tool of yours.

We built a beautiful editor where in the right sidebar, you could see your previous updates or any other information you might want to pull from to write the next update!

2. Smart Blocks

We believed deeply that pulling information out of your tools into structured narratives would ease the process of writing dramatically. This was a middle ground we built until eventually, the AI will be able to go pick the tools, filter the information, and bring it back to the app (though this is much further out than I originally believed it to be)

Moving On

Post-launch last-January, we onboarded about 50 ish companies into paid pilots selecting them from a list of 500 companies that told us they wanted what we were building in an in-depth way. A couple of thousand people in total signed up. So this overall tells there’s a significant signal to solve a big problem here. Thank you to all the people (you!) who talked to us about your problems and gave us a chance to solve them.

Horizontal Product Challenges

tl;dr Turned out to be extremely challenging for a small team of 5 on a pre-seed. Likely it would help if you had 3-5x the amount of capital we raised to fully test our hypothesis or within a larger organization.

Our approach to the solution required us to be a mile wide and an inch deep. The reason for this is we were taking on a workflow that many folks do in different ways in various other tools and we needed to meet parity with some of their existing workflows. While possible, doing that in a performant way while building out various innovations proved to be,

The other thing that’s very hard for horizontal products is who is their champion/persona inside an organization buying it. A proxy test of this is, to ask your friends to describe Notion or Slack and who on their team set it up, you’ll get an incredible diversity of answers because the marketing, positioning, and persona work is a very fun challenge for these products. Deciding between tops down vs. bottoms up. How do you position it in outreach efforts? This topic deserves its blog post.

Frequency of Usage

tl;dr Known issue before launch but it caught up to us through feedback cycles

We knew what we were building was only a starting point inside the organization. it’s very hard to build a company around a product that a person uses only 1-2x a week and we were aware of that. However, it seemed like a critical workflow in certain roles in the organization so a good place to get started. We didn’t realise until about 3-4 months post launch (1.5 years into the company) that if your user is only using it 1x a week, then unless you have an infinite warchest, you’re not iterating fast enough! This made it too slow a burn for us to demonstrate progress fast enough

But our work is not done yet! New stuff coming soon

Many folks are working on similar or adjacent problems, and I wish them all the best: Campsite, Syncup.ai, Stepsize, Velma, Spoke, Glean!

Also thank you to many of you who asked some great questions which I’ll cover at a different time! @gm_mertd @designpapa @theericanderson

We’re excited to introduce Automated Standups, our latest tool using AI that allows teams to cut out the manual work it takes to write updates and makes it easier than ever to update others. Join our limited beta today - reply or pick a time to be a part of the beta!

Sign up today!

Automated Standup significantly reduces the manual effort spent updating your teammates and allows you to focus on what matters by:

• Parsing through your plans and progress so you don’t have to, with integrations for your existing tools across Github, JIRA, Linear, Asana and more.

• Pre-writing updates for you, saving you the time and effort it takes to manually collect all the information yourself.

• Editing updates right within Slack, allowing you to keep business as usual without any interruptions.

• Coming soon! Continuously improving accuracy within the tool from messages and comments you make in Slack, Notion and Google Docs.

Get team alignment–even in a remote or hybrid environment–without the extra effort.

With Automated Standups, status updates are now seamless, letting you focus on what matters. Ship value, not status reports.

Setting Up Stand-ups 🎥 - Watch Video

Sign up today!

FAQs

Am I the right fit for the beta?

The criteria we are looking for are based on if your team:

• Has standups already in place

• Shares updates asynchronously

• Uses Slack

• Consists of 4 - 10 people

We’re looking for somebody who will give us feedback every few days for the next few weeks via a shared Slack channel.

Can I customize the format of the standup?

• Not yet, but it’s coming soon! Today’s format templates are “yesterday”, “today”, and “blockers”.

Can Broadcast post a person’s standup even if they don’t hit send?

• Yes, a setting to auto-post will be available. This is useful if your team spans multiple time zones and you want to have standups posted at a single time.

JIRA

We added a JIRA integration to make it easier to pull in tickets, epics, and more.

Custom Prompts

We're in the early days of automating your raw data into neat paragraphs. Along the way, if you want to tinker with the output, you can now customize the prompts we use for text generation with smart blocks.

Embeds: Loom & Figma

We have made it easy to include your Loom and Figma content in Broadcast. You can even use them as placeholders in your templates. Easily accessible via the slash command menu.

Plus some more

• Improved support for smart blocks in templates

• Fixed issues with skipping editions

• Previous messages will now show up correctly in the split view

• Fixed the ordering of the Continue Writing section on the home page

• Improved handling of long messages

• Broadcast links now resolve when shared in Slack

Coming soon:

• Automatic summaries for long messages

• Changelog-specific workflow 🪄

We’re spending most of our time around creating smart blocks and improving reliability across the app.

Smart Blocks

Set up once, re-use every time.

Often, when you write an update or status report, you check other tools to catch up on the latest. With Smart Blocks in Broadcast, you can connect your existing tools to pull in the most relevant information directly into your update without switching tabs.

We’re starting with commonly used tools like JIRA, Asana, Linear, and Github and will bring more in as we onboard more of you. This is a key step towards drafts that write themselves.

Plus some more

• Added user information over collaborative writing cursors

• Improved handling for uploading multiple images simultaneously

• Better UX for previous messages in split view

• Fixed a bug where Gmail sometimes assumed non-English character sets

• Keeping this short for the first one!

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