Startup Spotlight #77: Perfect Recall

Perfect Recall is the note-taking app for your Zoom calls.

Jan 25, 2021

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I got the chance to speak with David Gu, co-founder of Perfect Recall, about what he’s working on at his startup, and any advice he has for emerging entrepreneurs.

Perfect Recall is the note-taking app for your Zoom calls. The startup helps people who want a simpler note-taking workflow so you can stop relying on several fragmented tools to record, transcribe, take notes, and share your call learnings. Perfect Recall’s workflow is to first take notes with our app during the call, which are synced up with the video recording and transcription. Afterward, easily make clips from the best parts of the call to share with anyone.

Gu is the co-founder of Perfect Recall. Before starting the company, he was studying software engineering at the University of Waterloo.

Startup Spotlight: Perfect Recall

Problem: There are no good ways to share insights from a Zoom call - notes are subjective and no one will watch a 45-minute long meeting or read the whole transcript.

Market: Our target market is UX researchers, PMs, founders, and customer success roles. There are over 20M people in our target market, which makes this a 5B+ market.

Solution: We let you easily create video snippets from Zoom calls to share with your team, and take time-stamped notes so you can reference the video (objective) along with your notes (subjective).

Team: We're a team of 2. My co-founder is Amanda Zhu, and we met at university.

Recent Success:

Gu: We've been really successful at keeping our development speed high, and iterating on our product constantly. One of the reasons why we're able to iterate so fast is because we've set up a tight feedback loop between shipping new features, and getting feedback from our customers. We do high-touch onboardings where we spend 30 min with everyone to get them set up with our software and for us to learn about their use case. This has been super helpful, since we connect with our customers in a more personal way, which makes them more comfortable in giving honest feedback and letting us know of things they really want. We also consistently run user-interviews with people who aren't current customers, which brings new perspectives and helps us identify problems that are holding people back from using Perfect Recall.

Recent Struggle:

Gu: Both my cofounder and I come from technical backgrounds, so one of the very first things we struggled with was learning non-technical skills that were crucial for a startup, but widely outside of our knowledge, like sales, marketing, design, etc. Doing sales, especially to larger companies, was a completely new process. We had to learn a lot on our feet, and we definitely had some stumbling blocks on the way there. Even though this was difficult for us, taking on tasks that were outside of our core competencies was super valuable. We've learned a ton about our customers and the market from doing sales calls, for example.

Founder Advice:

Gu: One piece of advice I can give is that the best problems to work on are the problems you regularly experience yourself. Perfect Recall was actually a pivot from our original product - Hyperdoc - which was a code-documentation tool targeted at larger companies. While my cofounder and I both worked at these types of companies before, once we started working full-time on our startup we didn't have the same problems we used to have and became disconnected from the problem that Hyperdoc was solving. This made it a lot harder to figure out if the product was useful, and how to make it better. Iterating on your product, especially in the early days, is a lot quicker and more effective if you can apply your own product to your day-to-day and know how well it solves your own pain.

Three Cool Founders You Should Know About:

Gu: Here are three founders you should check out next!

Yair Dovrat, Founder of Sweeps: Sweeps makes any website 40% faster with a single line of code, by optimizing how it loads third-party tools.
Thomas Mann, Founder of Raycast: Raycast makes it simple, fast, and delightful to control your tools.
Dave Jeffery, Founder of ToDesktop: ToDesktop enables web businesses to convert their Web App into a Desktop App.

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