Launch HN: Circleback (YC W24) – Tooling to make meetings more efficient
Hey HN! We’re Ali and Kevin from Circleback (https://circleback.ai), an AI-powered product to help teams make more efficient use of meetings. Circleback automatically writes notes and assigns action items, as well as extract things you care about after every meeting. Here’s a demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=13NX0QxG5hI&t=10s.

Meetings can suck (https://paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html), but we think better tooling can make them suck less. With Circleback, you don’t have to jot down notes/action items, review past calls to extract what was said, tediously update other sources (i.e. CRMs, issue trackers), or forget where you left off last time.

Ever had to hop on a 30-min call with someone to get unblocked on something you're working on? You go off and do what you need to do, but the outcomes/learnings of that call aren’t documented anywhere. Next time someone wants to do something similar, they end up having a very similar 30-min call. This is a common pattern across organizations, especially medium-to-large ones, and it’s just one example of the vast inefficiency of meetings.

Needless to say, the best meetings are the ones you never attend in the first place. Really good notes let you skip more meetings and catch up with what you need later. In fact, some teams are using Circleback precisely to avoid having unnecessary attendance in meetings. That’s the holy grail as far as we’re concerned!

This space is a good fit for LLMs because while they can’t do everything, they excel at processing unstructured data like a transcript. To get rid of even 20% of busywork around meetings is already a massive win—and we think the potential is a lot higher than that.

For a realistic example, I imported one of GitLab’s meetings from their YouTube channel (they famously publish them!) into Circleback. The original video is here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1dwzE5j-IQw (though you won’t want to watch the whole thing) and you can view the notes Circleback wrote for it here: https://app.circleback.ai/view/lt93jwzdg3hdzcdnxmm.

You can create automations in Circleback for tasks that come up repeatedly. For example, you can create a workflow to identify feature requests that come up in customer interviews and create tasks for them in your issue tracker and post an update to Slack with the notes from the meeting.

Some of the ways people currently use Circleback include: remote teams gathering context from meetings they didn't attend; sales teams automatically updating their CRM and keeping track of what they last talked about with a client; and executive assistants sharing meeting minutes with the rest of the team.

For engineers, past meetings turn into a knowledge base, so you can search for anything that came up in a meeting before—e.g. some obscure quirk about a sequence of API calls, or how you figured out some bug 6 months ago. If you had a meeting about how to run a service, you can use search to find that meeting and watch the exact moment it was shown. Also, some engineers appreciate having issues be automatically created for tasks that come up during standups. That may not be how everyone likes to work, but it beats doing it manually.

With regards to privacy/security, we use industry-leading practices for handling customer data (i.e. secured at-rest and in-transit) and we're in the process of getting our SOC 2 type II certification. https://security.circleback.ai has more on how data is handled. We also immediately and irreversibly delete all associated data when a meeting or account is deleted and by default don't store any recordings of meetings.

Signup requires an email and name. Normally we require credit card information but we’re disabling that for HN to make it easier to try out the product. After signing up, you can: 1) connect your calendar to have Circleback join your meetings, 2) add Circleback by pasting in a meeting link, 3) record an in-person meeting from your phone or laptop, or 4) import the audio/video of a meeting you’ve previously recorded (this is what I did with the GitLab meeting).

The best way to see how Circleback works is to try it out in one of your own meetings. We have a free trial and it takes about 2 minutes to get started. We’d love to get your feedback and look forward to your comments!