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!
I see no mention here of using a pre-existing standard chat protocol like XMPP or Matrix, it looks like they rolled their own. Therefore this is not interoperable and is yet another proprietary walled garden. No GNU/Linux client either. Next.
That's the way the game is played in the IM space. Sucks, but the only way out of that is to build an open source product.
This looks great. What is the reason for adding the https://sso.tax? Why did you make SSO an enterprise feature?
Is it due to some (technical) reason that would require a monetary compensation to be profitable?
SSO has security benefits (on top of the maintainability aspect) which would also benefit small businesses.
To be honest, we're still finalizing our long-term pricing details. For what it's worth, "Sign in with Google" and "Sign in with Microsoft" are available to all users, and we'll prioritize additional canonical OIDC providers as demanded (let us know what you need!). 100% agree with the security benefits here. The SSO reference on our pricing page specifically applies to SAML-based IdPs, intended for customers who require further customization re: auth and provisioning strategy.
I hadn't the time to look around further, so I missed the Google and Microsoft SSO login options. As long as those are/remain free, there is no SSO tax.
I will have another look when I have more time, thank you.
SSO tax seems like a very reasonable price differentiation method to me. Most of the price increases on sso.tax are quite reasonable for a company that needs SSO (most companies I've worked in don't bother until they are above 100 employees, despite what that site says).
> most companies I've worked in don't bother until they are above 100 employees, despite what that site says
Companies don't "bother with" SSO because using SSO is expensive, since every product charges more for the privilege. Otherwise there's no reason why a 2-person company shouldn't be using SSO from the get go.
There are many small businesses that outsource their IT to managed service providers, but are understandably limited in their budget.
In my opinion, SSO tax results in arbitrary denial of employing best practices for these businesses.
Passwords are evil, because people generally don't care about security or don't have the capacity to employ proper hygiene around passwords. This likely means that SSO tax indirectly contributes to an increased number of account compromises (especially in small businesses, because more limited funds means more limited security; they're low-hanging fruit for bad actors).
The alternative is that the starter pricing tiers are more expensive. Pick your poison.
> SSO tax seems like a very reasonable price differentiation method to me
Security is not a differentiation method. It's table stakes for any technical product. That's what the above linked website explains.
> Security is not a differentiation method. It's table stakes for any technical product.
Security as table stakes, sure. SSO, certainly not.
It's an additional cost, last I checked it was between 10$ and 20$ per user per month if you take the cheapest option and outsource it.
This whole notion of "Unless you meet this security standard that 99% of products don't meet, your product hasn't met table stakes" is nonsense and needs to die.
SSO will get cheaper in the future; for now it's hard for a product development team to justify getting 0$ in revenue just because of some purity test by irrelevant folk on the internet.
We will have to agree to disagree on whether SSO is security or not.
Running my own keycloak or another ory hydra is a boring task. Locking SSO behind some arbitrary scale and raked up price takes sales away from you. It’s a matter of perspective.
If they're offering SSO using a 3rd party provider like Auth0 then they probably have to charge for it because of how expensive it is.
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.
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.
"We haven't figured out pricing" sounds like a big turnoff for anyone seriously considering this who wants self service.
Just pick something that's a no brainier for people to try, change it later if you have to. Your biggest risk right now is people walk without giving the product real consideration. Lack of clarity on pricing will do that for a lot of people, even though you are offering a free trial.
Thanks for the advice. One challenge for us will be how to price-in token based costs, e.g. downstream GPT services. There was an interesting post earlier today on HN related to this https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43186032 which recommended progressive pricing, which I thought was really interesting. On the other hand, the marginal cost of these services is being aggressively driven down by the big players so it may ultimately be safe to provide a fixed cost subscription model.
Have you thought about carving out the token expense? I.e. giving users the option of using their own api key vs you being the middle man for that expense?
Yes, we've discussed that, it makes sense IMO
"Individual messages or entire Discussions can be moved after the fact" -- sounds like a start, but I want more.
Being able to tag chats with keywords would be nice. Being able to pull chats into docs easily would be nice. Being able to pull chats into more than one doc -- not just move, but tag/reference/copy. Global tags (with ACLs) as well as team and personal tags (also with ACLs) would be fantastic. Don't forget read and access ACLs, not just write ACLs.
Email integration would be nice. Emails -> IM, so I can read IMs and emails in one app. IM -> email (right-click on a range of messages, click send, get placed in $MUA and edit).
Don't forget retention controls, support for on-prem, etc.
I was at Yahoo when they did a big email redesign, and the new design didn't work for 1/2 their users. Digging deeper, they found that email users kinda fall into 2 camps: filers and pilers. Filers carefully organize their data so they can quickly navigate to their target. Pilers just collect stuff in a big pile and use search to find their target.
Sounds like you're a filer (I am too). Sounds like emdash is kind of a mix of filing and piling.
I can't file. I can tag. I can't stand the idea that something belongs in only one box.
> Being able to tag chats with keywords would be nice. Being able to pull chats into docs easily would be nice. Being able to pull chats into more than one doc -- not just move, but tag/reference/copy. Global tags (with ACLs) as well as team and personal tags (also with ACLs) would be fantastic. Don't forget read and access ACLs, not just write ACLs.
Tagging is another organizational feature that is on our roadmap and has always made sense to me. Right now our organizational model is primarily hierarchical which has obvious limitations.
RE: email integration - We have a pretty robust email integration right now. Neville was always insistent that we shouldn't force people into the app to have a conversation, especially for one-off collaborators who get looped into a chat. They can stay blissfully ignorant of the fact that the conversation is actually happening on emdash if it suits them.
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
Same here! Slack is… fine. The one catch for Emdash for me is that we are hybrid (3 days in office) and use Zoom Rooms for our conference room are pretty happy with it.
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 :-)
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!
Side question: Do these animations linked to scrolling add some real value to the readers? Is there some experimental data showing value (e.g., conversion rate) over a static page? Thanks.
I found the text appearing in waves like that quite disturbing. It takes away from the classiness of the product.
Appreciate the feedback on this. We do want to focus folks on the product's value prop and remove distractions. I wouldn't say we are attached to the animations by any means and will have a chat with our team. Cheers.
I enjoyed
do conversations support nested threads? one frustrating limitation of slack is that a convo in a channel can be put into a thread, but that thread can't have nested threads, which makes it more difficult to follow long, multi-person conversations
We do! In theory, we support infinite nested threads within conversations. In practice, we found that most folks don't go deeper than 3 levels. However, the functionality is there.
One of the usecases that is relevant for us is supporting other companies over call. Zoom and team are built from meetings but not for support.
Key things for support are:
1. Ability to share access to the customers machine with out any hassle and easy acknowledgement for sharing access
2. Recordings and summarirs automatically gets added to tickets and issues
3. Playbooks are handy for the support engineer during the call
Thanks for flagging this use case for us and agree that Zoom/Teams are better suited for presenting vs supporting.
To your specific points:
#1 makes a lot of sense and I sense the "low friction" part of this is the key distinction.
#2 is something we have thought about through the lens of a yet to be built Zapier integration. This would effectively allow you to create more custom methods to route data from emdash into your CRM/other systems of record for customers. Curious if this approach would be interesting.
#3 is in theory supported today. There are several ways you could store/share playbooks for support engineers. For example, you can create a Team and upload the playbooks as shared resources.
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.
Very cool -- feels like teams are in "app overload" now with too much context switching. This looks pretty seamless and agree with others -- the summarization is a really nice feature.
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.
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.
Really cool. Awesome product from a solid team!
linux client planned?
If there's enough demand we can release one! :)
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.
Good luck, the sales cycles for large enterprise to switch from zoom/slack are super long... and I'm sure now that salesforce owns slack they're gonna be giving bundle discounts which will make it even harder to switch.
I'll also note, I've yet to work for a place that would even consider paying for the teams pro stuff, and I haven't seen it at any of our clients either, so I'm really curious to know see how big the market is for this
keep it up phil, neville and the team.
Very cool guys, I think this will crush