Async Company

While researching Clearn, a platform to provide and receive mentorship with remote colleagues in entirely new ways, I came across an existing start-up that seemed somewhat similar in nature. I thought I'd share my initial, unedited thoughts ... So that this may help me for people hearing about Clearn for the first time?

Here are my raw, mostly unedited thoughts about the experience of reading through their landing page:

1) Beginnings

Ok, so they want to have voice memos that "move ideas forward" -- but what is so special about voice memos? How is this different than just recording a voice message on Slack, Teams, iPhone and sending?

Started to open a video ... Just a Youtube video seemed cookie cutter, looked like somethign that was just an animated PDF ...

No thanks. Show me humans.

Didn't make it til end of video. Looking to glance around other things.

2) Continued

OK it has iOS, Mac, and web app ... so not business friendly.

Is this designed by and for creatives scratching their own itch?

OK, skimming through the feature of sharing your thoughts as a "dynamic link" where anyone can listen, unauthenticated ... to me, seems like:

1. a massive privacy concern, and
2. a massive security risk?

3) Another Tool in Your Kit!

The website mentions "adding async to your creeator toolkit ... "

Great, so, it's just another tool?

Seems like a pass?

OK, they can read your recordings with "accurate transcripts" ... Great, so it's another Whisper / ChatGPT wrapper?

4) FAQs

Ok, the fact that they started the question with "why do you believe in voice messages at work?" -- not to be rude, but it's about the customer, not the founders.

And adding insult to injury, if the question of "who is async for" and "why use async" is coming up frequently, is there a broader problem?

5) FAQs - What's the problem?

And finally (but, of course, most importantly -- and possibly not great it is the last question and not obvious at this point) -- "what problem are you trying to solve?"

Async writes :

In today’s on-demand economy, we expect Ubers, Amazon packages, and Seamless orders to arrive right away. Now, people even expect their friends and coworkers to be on-demand.

Always being reachable doesn’t mean you’re always available. But the pressure to answer everyone in the moment makes it feel like none of your time is your own. So we created the first Voice App for when meetings take too long, and writing feels impersonal.

To be honest, couldn't even copy-paste, and inspecting elements and seeing "framer" doesn't inspire much confidence ... They couldn't roll their own React / Svelt marketing home page?

And is the claim at all true that they "created the first Voice App for when meetings take too long, and writing feels impersonal." Is it true because they capitalized "Voice App"?

6) Call to Action

Good to great call to action, although I personally don't a) see the clear value proposition and b) trust the founders enough to sign up for a demo.

Before doing so, I'd like to know:

1. What are they planning to do with my data?
2. How will they keep my data safe?

Conclusion

There was also a list of bios of people, and some investors, etc. ... But for me I didn't really see much of a value proposition there. Felt like another tool in a see of tools.

I (think) I would have really liked seeing them double click into one or two main use cases, other than the laundry list of use cases (felt like they were trying to throw darts at a board and see what would stick ... like someone at a carnival, it could be used for ... 1:1s, updating investors, holding town halls, picking brains ... take your pick!*)

Result: passed on a sign-up.

Takeaway

For me, when thinking about marketing or selling Clearn, really important to double click into one or two main use cases, specific to a personae, and not dillute the message.

Except instead of having to schedule, wait, and (let's be honest) re-schedule, Cleanr provides an intuitive, science-based asynchronous platform for better mentorship.

Insert

*Note to Will: if this is useful, insert some kind of nice looking star system, although it is mostly for myself, this is basically a review! And people like this kind of stuff / it's fun / useful to do & rate things numerically ... *

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