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Show HN: Emdash – Slack/Zoom alternative for distributed team collaboration

by pz on 2/26/25, 3:10 PM with 67 comments

Hi 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!

  • by RadiozRadioz on 2/27/25, 6:25 AM

    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.

  • by mtlsnk on 2/27/25, 6:16 AM

    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.

  • by hamzaaftab on 2/26/25, 6:59 PM

    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.

  • by clacker-o-matic on 2/26/25, 4:26 PM

    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.

  • by cryptonector on 2/27/25, 7:00 AM

    "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.

  • by shaneos on 2/26/25, 5:46 PM

    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

  • by jesselawson on 2/28/25, 4:37 PM

    Hi team--and hello Fred! You and I had some great conversations about Slack's direction--as well as its missed opportunities--back when we worked there together. I was leading developer education at the time, and frustrated with the decisions that were coming down that caused us to pivot away from what we agreed on was the "true core experience" of a collaborative messaging system: connecting users with the knowledge they need without having to parse through other knowledge that may be important in different contexts.

    I'm genuinely excited that you're in this space now, too, as I myself have had my nose to the grindstone building out what the collaboration app for distributed teams that I've always wanted. We need options/competition in this space; just this year alone, I've had a little over a a dozen conversations with interested folks in teams across the United States working in industries from agricultural sensors manufacturing to game studios for hire, and the same pain points that you and I were reasoning about back at Slack are the same pain points that users still unwillingly tolerate.

    See you around--and good luck out there!

    PS. As an English major I'd be remiss to not share that I love the name emdash. :D

  • by pz on 2/26/25, 3:12 PM

    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.

  • by alok-g on 2/27/25, 6:42 AM

    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.

  • by debarshri on 2/27/25, 6:57 AM

    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

  • by written-beyond on 2/26/25, 6:13 PM

    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.

  • by symbolicator on 2/26/25, 6:30 PM

    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”?

  • by lusujimo on 2/26/25, 11:57 PM

    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.

  • by insane_dreamer on 2/27/25, 9:18 PM

    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

  • by niutech on 2/26/25, 7:02 PM

    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?

  • by bmoney24 on 2/26/25, 5:58 PM

    This is very cool. The summarization feature stands out as my favorite.

  • by ckluis on 2/28/25, 12:47 PM

    fwiw, what no chat system has done is incorporate the wiki well.

    transferring data from chat to kb is incredibly tedious.

    do this and win my undying love.

  • by asadawan on 2/26/25, 8:55 PM

    Really cool. Awesome product from a solid team!

  • by reshmakh on 2/26/25, 5:26 PM

    product looks very cool - it's nice to see a consumer level of polish on a b2b experience

  • by trustinmenowpls on 2/27/25, 6:07 AM

    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

  • by alexbit2019 on 2/26/25, 6:46 PM

    keep it up phil, neville and the team.

  • by kieranderfus on 2/26/25, 5:13 PM

    Very cool guys, I think this will crush

  • by insane_dreamer on 2/27/25, 9:18 PM

    linux client planned?