andygcook

You can record your voice in different styles, which I think would help with inflection. I haven't had enough time to really experiment with it yet. The starting point is definitely an impressive effort on the Overdub/Descript team's side.

Here's a sample clip of the training audio: https://web.descript.com/afdff9c8-17d0-41bb-84ec-77709120709...

I recorded on a high quality microphone in a small closest with a foam mattress pad and blankets surrounding me. It was pretty soundproof. Upon re-listening to the audio, it does sound a little tinny, which likely has to do with the microphone settings.

I think the issue with the monotone is that my reading voice is different from my talking voice. When I'm freely talking, I'm more dramatic. When I'm reading, I'm less so because the only time I read out loud nowadays is to children before bedtime.

I do plan to resubmit the training script with a different style, but recording the full audio was admittedly tiring so I haven't sent that in yet. I'm sure with some experiment I could get it closer to reality.

I did get some helpful advice from someone on the Descript team on how to use punctuation and misspellings to fix some of the intonation. Overall, it's really impressive technology and I can think of a few different uses for my business for my own voice.

I signed up for Descript and did the Overdub training a few weeks ago. It's impressive, albeit not a perfect match for my actual voice. You train the voice by reading 30 minutes of Wizard of Oz using a high quality microphone. I used a Yeti in a closet at my house. I do plan to record the additional hour of supplemental reading which might help make it more authentic.

(Side note - I didn't know Dorothy's shoes were actual silver in the book)

My use case for Overdub is to quickly correct errors in recorded demo/how-to screencast videos for my startup without having to do redo the audio.

Here's a sample of the Overdub output vs. my actual recorded voice if you're curious: https://web.descript.com/084a416c-57d4-4df8-980b-24e0df82532...

Yes, Andrew Mason is the CEO. He's full time on Descript now and isn't working on Detour anymore.

The only other one at the time that also built a Slack integration was Guru. Confluence didn’t have a Slack integration and HipChat was still alive too, so our bet was that we could be the Confluence equivalent for the Slack/Github/Asana ecosystem. Things have wildly changed since then (e.g. Slack bought HipChat, dozens of new competitors, etc), but we’ve adapted.

Agreed and happy to share because you asked.

At the time, the "company" was just my co-founder and me. We were essentially going to fail/give up by taking on consulting work. The decision to integrate with Slack was a bit of a bet-the-company move. We were building an internal wiki to compete with Confluence. Our early beta users told us they'd use our MVP, and when we gave it to them, no one actually did. When we asked, they just said, "We just keep forgetting. Still interested." We then asked about hooking up our wiki to Slack so you could search from Slack and get notifications for new content, and they wanted that desperately. Some teams even pre-paid us to build it for them. So we scrapped our whole MVP and three months of work, and rebuilt the entire product on top the Slack platform in two weeks over the holidays.

When I say, "on top of Slack", I mean we literally used Slack's APIs as our backend and just rebuilt a "wiki" front end serving up Slack files from the APIs. We even deep linked to their Post as the editor in our wiki. The goal was to validate demand so we did it as leanly as possible. Once we launched, we got about 200 sign ups in 48 hours. From there, we built a real product, which is now tettra.com.

I wrote an article about the pros and cons of building on another company's platform about a year after that which goes into more details if you're interested: https://thinkgrowth.org/building-on-slack-saved-our-startup-...

Sam Altman posted a tweet storm about this topic a couple of hours ago. You'd probably find it interesting: https://twitter.com/sama/status/1297912739206242306

One of the best points the author hits on is the benefit of platforms for MicroSaaS companies. Having a reliable source of highly qualified prospects makes it much easier to build out a profitable SaaS business because you can spend most of your time building while still closing customers.

The tough thing about this is that the ease of building into the platform also attracts a lot of competition (which the author mentions in the post too). Getting in on a fast growing platform early is really beneficial because you can arbitrage the opportunity before others get into the platform. My startup was probably one of the first 50 apps in the Slack app store when it launched in December 2015.

Since then, there's been about 5 dozen startups who are in the space now, but that early Slack platform momentum gave us enough of a lead to build a real business closing in on $1M ARR with 5 people.

Quick follow up: Do you have any details on plans for pricing or a terms of service I can read?

After seeing the success of Figma, Miro, and other real-time collaboration tools, I was wondering how long it would before an enterprising team developed the same experience for video editing. A simple-but-powerful enough video editor is a need I've regularly experienced over the years at my startup. Adding on collaboration workflows and cloud-native files (instead of storing actual file versions in Dropbox) makes this even more interesting. Will check it out. Good luck with the launch and the rest of YC!

FYI - All the TechStars listings are erroring out when you click through to Greenhouse

Some feedback:

- A filter by location/remote would be helpful.

- Right clicking and opening in a new tab doesn't work. I have a feeling that is how many people earnestly looking for a job are going to navigate. Search the list, then analyze individual postings.

- Clicking on the modal background doesn't close the modal

Couple of questions:

- Are the firms at the top the only ones in the dataset, or just the notable ones people might want to filter on?

- Would be curious to hear more on how you're sourcing the job listings.

Overall, I thought it was well implemented and easy to navigate. Sent it to a friend looking for a job in VC. Nice work.

(edit: formatting)

Do you have any examples yet of companies using this for user training classes? Would be an interesting way to do scalable group onboarding.

By the prose formation, this seems like a GPT-3 generated comment.

I'm friends with quite a few Harvard MBAs now (think what you will, but the ones I know are all great people :) because my partner is a Harvard MBA. Without a doubt, they all said they'd take a gap year if they were in the current situation. Half the value is the credentialing, but the other half is the experience and network you build through it.

Vermont has phenomenal beers if you like hoppy IPAs. Besides being a very fun city, most bars in Burlington, VT carry beers from the local breweries around there: Lawson's (Sip of Sunshine), the Alchemist (Heady Topper), Fourteenth Star (Tribute), Zero Gravity, Hill Farmstead, and more.

If you ever end up in MA, Tree House is worth checking out and has 4 of the top 20 beers on Untappd right now. Vitamin Sea in Weymouth, MA is also very good if you're closer to the coast.

As I venture more into my 30's, I almost exclusively drink session beers when I want something hoppy. Drinking even one 8%+ ABV DIPA leaves me pretty much useless the next day.

Founders All Day IPA is a solid go to. Other session IPAs/APAs I enjoy are Notch Left of the Dial, Lagunita's DayTime, Harpoon Rec League, and Zero Gravity Little Wolf APA.

I agree that it's definitely not a foolproof analogy. But good food (like good music) is usually a table-stakes ingredient for a successful restaurant. Again of course again, there are exceptions there too.

Agreed. After an initial listening, it's clear Steve's really talented. Which admittedly probably helps with the earning money part of the article.

It's kind of like that PG quote:

"What Customers Want - It's not just startups that have to worry about this. I think most businesses that fail do it because they don't give customers what they want. Look at restaurants. A large percentage fail, about a quarter in the first year. But can you think of one restaurant that had really good food and went out of business?"

(edit - formatting)

Agreed the Medium paywall is not good. But technically, I don't think Indie.vc wrote this post. It's on the marker.medium.com publication and was written by a freelance journalist: https://marker.medium.com/@jennifer_7809

The study this references was mentioned in the book Influence by Robert Cialdini. IIRC, even using the word because with a circular objective results in higher compliance. For example, “Excuse me. Can I use the xerox machine because I have to make copies?” resulted in 90%+ compliance rate vs. a ~50% rate with just “Excuse me. Can I use the xerox machine?” My memory is probably slightly with the exact percentages, but I always found that study fascinating.

It's interesting that the short term solution of not giving refunds will likely cause long-term pain for universities because they are then admitting that remote is "the same as" in person. Most of the university value is in the experience. I'd predict that if colleges don't admit in person > online and don't offer refunds, then many students will decide to save the $150K over four years and just take online courses, then live in an interesting city to get that life/social experience.

What kind of marketing does your wife do and can you send me her Upwork profile? I’m looking for some extra help for my company. Email in profile.

April Dunford's book, Obviously Awesome, is very good and worth reading if you're a founder or marketer (or both.) We reverse engineered her workshop and did it as a team at the end of last year for my startup. Was very much worth the day.

I thought this thread on MasterClass's coordinated distribution strategy was interesting and worth reading: https://twitter.com/TheCoolestCool/status/126538262872474009...

The fact MasterClass ranks first in Google for "what is a shallot?" is pretty surprising.

Very cool project and slick implementation. How are the plops rendered on the homepage video without the visitor having the extension installed? My hunch is that there is a JS file that is included but would be curious to learn more.

Sharepoint does billions in revenue per year for Microsoft. Besides competing directly with Airtable, Lists combined with Sharepoint will also likely help to head off Notion, which has docs, sheets, and boards bundled together.

OP, good for you learning how to code at a young age and for taking the time to share your lessons learned along the way. Don't get discouraged by the inevitable troll comments here. I'm sure you're already inspiring the next generation of young coders because your journey will be more relatable to them than a programmer with 15 years of professional experience. Thank you for taking a risk and posting here. Keep learning, keep sharing, and keep at it.

It’s interesting that 87% of people say they are satisfied with current tools and processes that enable remote team communication, yet 35% list collaborating with colleagues and clients as a top challenge. There seems to be a disconnect between those two sections of the report.

Took me a minute to figure out what the pinning feature does. At first, I thought it might make the Tater element unmovable but that didn't seem to be the case. Realized only after revisiting the page that it keeps the comment open. Obviously up to you, but might want to change the wording on that.

Spudtacular demo by the way.