We’re Not Alone – New Startups Agree That Meetings Can Be Fixed

As we’ve said before, LessMeeting was born out of a shared frustration with just how bad the meetings we’ve been in can be.  We tried to find a solution but didn’t see anything that helped our problem.

At the time products mostly addressed what we call “The 35,000 Foot Problem”, or how to use technology to reduce the cost of meetings.  Hence the WebEx’s and GoTo Meeting’s that we’re all familiar with.

However, over the past 12 months or so we’ve seen a noticeable uptick of startups that, like us, feel meetings don’t have to be a necessary evil.  And you know what, we’re glad to welcome these competitors to the market space.

Competitors Wanted!

One of our initial challenges was to get people to understand that bad meetings are a real problem with a real solution.  However as Ben Yoskovitz explains, new competitors are a good sign because it helps validate your market and in turn, helps the overall market grow as customers see the buzz.

Market validation helps a market grow.  It drives more customers – who are acting as followers vs. leaders – to make buying decisions. It creates buzz. It awakens the interest of investors.

We’ve updated our competitor landscape and want to share with you some of the cool new competitors out there.  Take a look & let us know what you think.  What offerings do they have that you wished LessMeeting did?  What other signs have you seen that the meeting effectiveness market space is growing?

LessMeeting

https://lessmeeting.com
Let’s start with us. We help you throughout the whole meeting life-cycle. Plan your meetings better with agendas. Make Running meetings easier with a great meeting minutes tool, and then actually Follow Up on tasks with automated to-do reminders.

GMinutes

http://gminutes.com/
GMinutes is an online meeting minutes tool that will help you schedule, write, and share minutes. Similar to LessMeeting, you can also track your action items.
Cool Feature: Gantt Chart reporting for your group’s action items

LucidMeetings

http://lucidmeetings.com/
Like LessMeeting, LucidMeetings approaches ways to improve the whole meeting life cycle: Meeting Preparation, In-Meeting Collaboration, and Post-Meeting Follow ups.

Cool Feature: In-Meeting speaker queue and chat section

Meetin.gs

http://www.meetin.gs/
Meetin.gs is an online meeting organization tool that offers many of the same features as the other entrants in the space.  Meetin.gs is currently in Beta and scheduled to go live soon so we look forward to checking it out.

Cool Feature:  New meeting bookmarklet

MeetingMix

http://meetingmix.com/
MeetingMix focuses on users such as Project Managers to help them run their meetings better through a dedicated & simple meeting webpage.

Cool Feature: WYSIWYG text editor for capturing meeting minutes

MinuteBase

http://minutebase.com/
MinuteBase focuses on making meeting collaboration effective and easy.  It’s a visually appealing tool and is very user experience friendly.

Cool Feature:  Schedule & find meeting times with the Shared Calendar

yaM

http://yamlabs.com/

yaM stands for “Yet Another Meeting,” and is a venture funded company focused on collaboration across meetings, notes, documents, brainstorming sessions, and tasks.

Cool Feature:  In meeting tools such as whiteboards, SWOT analysis, and voting

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**Update:**Since this post first came out we got some great feedback - in particular, three additional sites we missed!  Check out MeetingKing, miniMtg, and agreedo below…

agreedo

https://www.agreedo.com/
Agreedo focuses on some familiar meeting pains - preparing for, running, and collaborating during meetings.  Agreedo also features detailed task management options.

Cool Feature:  Easily create a follow-up meeting & choose the discussion items you want to carry over to your next meeting

MeetingKing

http://meetingking.com/

MeetingKing gives you a single tool to manage agendas, minutes, and tasks; you can also create standalone tasks outside of meetings.  While it’s in Beta you can try it out for free.

Cool Feature:  A dedicated Resources section on the site gives users additional meeting advice

miniMtg

http://www.minimtg.com/

Like its name suggests, miniMtg is a small, free, meeting app that focuses on a taking notes, assigning actions, and writing minutes from a shared meeting space.

Cool Feature:  Lack of features! miniMtg is incredibly easy to use so users aren’t confused with feature bloat