Show HN: emdash – Slack/Zoom alternative for distributed team collaboration
emdash.ioHi HN, I’m Phil, one of the co-founders building emdash. Previously, I was an early engineer at Facebook and led Customer Products at Square.
We’ve focused on making chat and video work together so distributed teams can stay aligned without drowning in information. You can try it here: https://emdash.io.
It frustrated us how easily important conversations would happen and then disappear. Slack never quite matched how we worked. Channels were too coarse which led to noisy notifications and broken search. Zoom meetings weren’t much better–unless someone took perfect notes (which rarely happened), video calls became black holes of lost knowledge.
We spent too much time trying to find the information we needed to do our jobs.
To address this, we’re testing a few concepts and would appreciate your feedback on the value of the following:
(1) Automatically record, summarize, and transcribe your team’s video chats. We store meeting content directly inside discussions to facilitate search and discovery.
(2) Make it easy to manage & organize conversations of varying scope. A chat between team members can be forked into a dedicated Discussion with its own audience permissions and subscription. Individual messages or entire Discussions can be moved after the fact. Conversations can evolve unpredictably, so having the right tools to keep them organized post-hoc was important to us.
(3) Improve search with AI and hierarchical information retrieval. We use LLMs to uncover insights, summarize content, and connect the dots across related discussions, meetings, and documents. You can ask questions like “What are the team’s priorities this week?” or “What did we decide to do with feature X?” and get back a generative response AND deep links into the original chats and meetings.
Try it out: https://emdash.io and tell us what you think!
Really like the self-documentation of what the team is working on through the auto summarization and share-out of meeting. Strongly believe in "communication is the job" at tech companies, and with this it doesn't have to feel like a chore.
Thank you for the feedback. That’s exactly the idea. We see it as "write once, share everywhere." Conversations, meetings, and decisions can generate useful context, and having summaries automatically show up right where people are already working saves time down the road.
I should introduce the rest of the crew. We're a team of builders who have worked together for the better part of the last decade. Neville and I were early engineers on Facebook Ads. Neville later founded Rimeto, which was acquired by Slack. Fred has held various roles driving growth and was an early employee at Facebook, Doordash, and Rimeto. Nick jumped into startups right out of college, joining Rimeto and now diving back in with us at emdash.
pz, what a great username :)
great team!
Great to see more competition in this space - I'm currently on Slack and not happy about it. Here's hoping Emdash can fill the void left by Workplace and get some momentum to put pressure on Slack. It's much needed
Amen. We've migrated teams from Workplace who really appreciated our hierarchical discussion model
> I'm currently on Slack and not happy about it
Yeah I heard that Slack is taking a breather this morning...
Heh, yeah that happened right after I made the post above. Fate, it would seem, has a sense of irony :-)
Have you seen what is happening with Slack now? It's down for hours. Doesn't it teach businesses that the crucial instant messaging should be self-hosted for privacy & independence on 3rd party? Why would businesses use your hosted product instead of e.g. open source Nextcloud Talk, Element.io or Mattermost on their own server?
Absolutely. If your team has the expertise and bandwidth, self-hosting Mattermost or similar tools makes a ton of sense. We may even explore a self-hosted version of emdash in the future.
That said, most customers tell us they’d rather focus their resources on their core business vs manage every tool themselves. Even those who’ve tried self-hosting haven’t necessarily seen better uptime vs Slack.
One note I have about your pricing page is that you don't explain what a startup or small to midsize team actually is. I would also much rather have a set pricing scheme immediately with a 60-90 day trial period similar to how slack works.
Hi, Fred here – I’m one of the founding team members. Thanks for the comment.
First, to the question about team sizes. We view "Startups" as generally teams with <25 users, followed by small/mid-sized "Growth" companies that have <250 employees. Beyond that, we anticipate most companies falling into the "Scale" category. That said, this could all be revised based on usage data and I will also update our website later today to reflect the above.
Regarding pricing, we haven’t finalized it yet because we’ve prioritized understanding how teams actually use emdash—what works, what doesn’t, and where we should focus.
Pricing is important, and we want to get it right. Typical usage patterns, evolving AI and cloud/infra costs, and where we fit competitively in the market are all variables we still need to explore. We’ll need to strike the right balance and be competitive enough with vis-a-vis the market.
It would be smart to start with a free trial before transitioning users to a paid plan. We’re still figuring out whether that should be time-based (e.g., 60-90 days), usage-based (e.g., after your 20th video meeting).
I get it – no one likes unexpected pricing shifts and when the time comes, we will be transparent about our thinking and communicate changes well in advance. Our goal is to build something sustainable, not just for us, but for the teams that rely on emdash. Hope this helps clarify.
Good luck guys! This maybe that I've usually been a part of smaller teams but the screenshots you guys provided are a little... overload-y.
Care to share what's the average size of your early adopters? Because it seems to be something great for larger teams but, then again I imagine the friction is greater for them too.
This is good feedback, thanks. We packed a lot into the product so far and could have spent more time focusing the media assets to distill things better.
Early adopters range in size from 2 people to ~20. As you said, the Catch-22 for larger teams usually have established tool stacks so the (operational) switching cost is prohibitive.
FWIW we are a team of 5 and already find the feature set useful (we're biased, of course). I expect that ~5 is the threshold the organizational and search features become invaluable.
This looks great — can’t want to try it as we grow our team at Mobility. Are there integrations with other work surfaces like GDrive / Notion for deep search retrieval like “What are we working on this week”?
This is in the works. We have a prototype integration with Github that supports the deep search use case you mentioned. My favorite anecdote from this was a few weeks ago I was revisiting some work on transactional support in our controller framework and asked assistant "A few months ago I was working on transaction support and had to revert my change. Can you remind me what happened?" and it spit back my original PR, the reversion, and a deep link into the standup video meeting where we discussed the issue. For me, that was the magic moment where I knew this could be something much more than just a chat client.
Really cool. Awesome product from a solid team!
This is very cool. The summarization feature stands out as my favorite.
Appreciate you reaching out about the summarization feature. Teams have been making use of it to save time. They like jumping directly to key moments of the meeting and also outright skipping meetings.
product looks very cool - it's nice to see a consumer level of polish on a b2b experience
Thanks! We’ve definitely put a lot of thought into making emdash feel smooth, intuitive, and frictionless. We are constantly looking at all the seams where pieces connect and making sure they fit tightly.
We probably over-invested in some details, but we believe those small touches add up, kind of like getting that nice “thunk” when closing a well-built car door. Glad you noticed the polish—it’s something we really care about!
Thanks! One of the benefits of dogfooding our product everyday is that we invest a lot in working out the everyday kinks in addition to the marquee features.
keep it up phil, neville and the team.
Very cool guys, I think this will crush