TLDR; This blog post introduces our new product, Moot meetings. Designed as a new, more engaging way to meet, Moot now lets you run super-engaging online meetings, without juggling a million tools.
At Moot, we believe in a world where remote work is more engaging than work IRL. We’ve always believed that. But like most start-ups, how that looks in the products we build has changed … just a little.
When we started building Moot less than a year ago, we had an entirely different product vision. We aimed to make Moot a place where anybody could build a homepage for their team, in just a few clicks. If Slack was for text-based communication, and Notion was a directory for documentation, Moot would be the in-between - a hub for alignment & all the most important information within an organisation.
We ultimately believed that we could make it easy for teams of any size to create their own homepage and establish a central hub for apps, resources and collaboration. But as we built, and built more, we started to gravitate towards building for presence - features that would help you feel like you were with the people you worked with, even if you weren’t. This initially took the form of one-click video calls, but later moved to features like multiplayer cursors and live editing of a shared dashboard.
And as more of you came to try us out, we got to know that you didn’t want a homepage (boohoo for us!), but a better way to meet. Which, in hindsight, was an obvious problem, and probably the thing we should have began with. Meetings suck. And even more so remotely!
So we questioned next: what’s actually wrong with meetings? The funny thing about remote meetings is that, although, they are a terrible experience, we’re also completely blind to the pain as we’ve been forced to work remotely over the past years. So we focused on listening to existing customers to understand the commonalities between their problems, and what made them excited about Moot. It turns out they were fed up with hacking meetings together through screenshare, having no way to get creative work done together with their teams, both internal and external. So we designed something better.
Collaborative tooling has come a long way, but there is still a long way to go. Products like Zoom have been made to be unbelievably reliable, but are designed for low trust interactions where teams don’t have the features to easily jump into collaborative work together - they are relegated to looking at the screens of their team. Tools like Slack, on the other hand, allow users to interact in a high-trust way, throwing back and forth media-rich messages, but ultimately are left to work on their own machine with no collaborative space.
So there’s no surprise that whiteboards have taken over the world of remote work, with apps like Miro and Figjam, as well as integrated whiteboards into the like of Zoom and Google Meet. They’re great ways to get creative juices spinning, and dive into a remote native collaboration. However, a whiteboard alone is not enough for the deep work teams need to do together. They’re often without video calling. They’re also messy, unstructured, and temporary.
Moot has notes, todos, tables, file sharing, bookmarking, whiteboarding, embedding, all in one customisable interface. There are almost no buttons or things to learn. It just works. And with AI and polls coming soon, we aren’t stopping there. People love experiences like Figma and Google Docs that allow collaboration in real time. We do, too. So every feature in Moot is designed to work both with others, and alone.
Moot is video-enabled, clean, structured and persisting. And in that, we realised that we were building something entirely new. Not another video-calling app, and not just another whiteboard. Not a project management tool, but not a collaborative notes app. Something in between. The best of a flexible canvas, with the dependability of a communications app like Slack or Teams.
So this is where we realised we’d not only need to tell people that there’s a better way, but we’d have to show them. That’s where Moot meet comes in. We’ve now created a way for people to spin up a workspace in a few clicks, without the need for authentication, so that they can meet with conviction. With a space to collaborate on all the tools needed to run a meeting, but without juggling a million tools.
So you might be wondering by now, how do I try it? And the answer is simple. Head to meet.moot.app (desktop only for now, we’re a small team!) and within 15 seconds, you can have a meeting to where you can invite anyone by link or by Google Calendar. Before everyone joins you can also spend a minute looking through our featured templates to get a headstart before anyone joins.
And there you have it, a meetings product, Moot style. Starting a Moot meeting couldn’t be easier! We’re now making an even better version for teams that will allow teams better control over how they meet, both internally and externally. Stay tuned for more. And let us know what you think of Moot meetings! We’re excited to see how you use it.