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Chris Messina
Top Hunter
Curious about the backend technology being employed. Can you say anything about your technology, and where your secret sauce is? I'm also curious to hear from @msg given his efforts with Superhuman not long ago.
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@chrismessina I like their approach of being up front that you are hiring a virtual employee VS hiring a know it all bot.
@chrismessina this is actually something @msg has thought a lot about, and helped us consider in the early days.
In building technology, we think it's best to start by thoughtfully choosing your constraints. For us, those were defined by our customers: Clara needed to be an always-on, highly responsive, intelligent, human employee. Yes, it is incredibly difficult to build this technology - Clara required a year and a half in beta - but if we have secret sauce it's not our algorithms. Any expert with data and time can write algorithms. It is our relentless investment in understanding our constraints - the constraints of our customers - and making technology decisions according to them.
After a year in beta, we’re excited to publicly introduce Clara: your partner in doing great work. Clara saves you hours a week by scheduling your meetings, and is already working with hundreds of great teams (Airbnb, Stripe, Pinterest).
Clara is the first truly human interface: an intelligence trained on high-quality data, labeled by the distributed efforts of smart people 24/7. Clara is getting smarter, faster than any system of its kind.
Get back to the things that matter. Add Clara to your team, or email me at maran@claralabs.com with questions.
@marannelson Love the design of the site! I've seen a couple of other AI start ups trying to tackle the problem of scheduling meetings. How are you differentiating yourself from what the others are doing?
@marannelson I have several friends also using Clara, and we love the intuitive design. May I know your vision of Clara?
@andrewlinfoot @marannelson Hi Andrew--
We believe the bar to bringing this experience into the mainstream requires a high level of product quality, and do not see our customers as data farms for poorly-performing algorithms. We are applying the same natural language and machine learning techniques (classical and modern, where applicable) as anyone in the space — we are experts in building scalable systems and machine learning. That said, a key difference here is that our ML is used to both drive automation and surface important information to human contractors, resulting in a better customer experience. Most products only focus on driving automation; their business models (usually cheap to free) require it.
Consequently, this human-in-the-loop involvement also serves as a feedback loop to labeling the success or failure of our algorithms, meaning Clara gets smarter, faster than anyone else could.
@joannejrr @marannelson Hi Joanne--
People - and technology - are always in a transition of some kind. Though we've recently invented a new platform in computing, we still interact with this technology in unintelligent, inhuman ways (spreadsheets, manual information-shuffling). We believe creating truly intelligent, intuitive interfaces to computing is the next step forward.
Scheduling is an incredibly powerful starting point, and was really the beginning of everything for Clara. We care about this pain point personally, and have built incredibly intimate relationships with hundreds of people in helping do this work for them over the past year and a half. We hope that by executing relentlessly well on our vision for Clara, we'll start giving people time back in really huge ways.
This looks really cool. I'm a happy user of Mixmax and Calendly, where I share my availability (with mixmax I pick a few times that I like and let the other person pick and it gets scheduled). This workflow has been good as I don't always have everything in my calendar (some tentative things that I know may happen later I tend to leave off). What am I missing with Clara?
@frankdenbow We don't think we're the perfect product for everyone yet, but our general philosophy here is that real life is hard. There are always complications (rescheduling, cancellations, long back-and-forth) that leave you needing to get the thing handled by a person. We feel that actually delivering on excellent, incredibly fast response times is a far superior user experience than being subjected to random web interfaces.
Note: sales teams hugely improve their conversions in switching over to Clara from web interface type products - which we feel is enough proof to say that people prefer to interact with responsive intelligence.
@eriktorenberg would also be curious to learn about this. if i remember correctly, the prices were higher in the beta phase
@eriktorenberg Evolved. heh. Translation: When are you going to get off the crazy train?
@eriktorenberg Great question. We've learned a lot about pricing. A couple things—
We only care about pricing as a means to an end: we want to give people a great experience with Clara that scales to support as many teams as possible. In the interest of that, we've added price points that accommodate Individuals, as well as Teams, affordably.
That said, we believe in the same things now that we always have (http://www.producthunt.com/tech/...). We want to open up a fundamentally new market for this user experience - Clara costs less than 10 times its human alternatives - while promising and delivering on reliability at scale. Let me say again: the cost of messing up a meeting is too high to provide a mediocre service, and Clara will succeed or fail as the consequence of how we manage the trust we are given by our customers.
What happens if one person CCs Clara and then the other person CCs Clara? The two Claras talk amongst themselves to work out a time? I want to see that happen. (also, Clara is super cool)
@awwstn Great question. I have had this happen several times since we started using Clara. The answer is that you get a meeting scheduled insanely fast =)
@sparkszilla @awwstn Can Clara adjust on the fly if something falls through? Is there a rescheduling feature for last minute cancellations and/or completely missed meetings? Or a short term "push back" request?
The team at Mattermark has been using Clara for about a year, and it's been one of the better decisions we've made as far as tools go.
When you wake up with a cold and all you have to do is grab your phone and write an email to Clara with a request to reschedule the day, it's incredible.
Maran calls Clara a truly human interface. Our Clara is called Claudia. It's interactions are so human that we have a running joke with new hires because they always ask where Claudia is when they get in the office.
It's going to be exciting to see where this goes! Congrats on the launch.
About 15 months ago, I was just preparing to launch my own business, Upside Partnership. A friend, Dan Kimerling, knew that I was going to be light on support staff and told me that Maran and Michael had just started working on something that might help me. He put us all in touch. Of course, the meeting was scheduled via Maran's Clara.
I was blown away. When I met with Maran, I first pleaded to be in the beta group, then I begged to invest.
So for as long as Upside Partnership has been running, "Clara Townsend" has handled all of my scheduling. Seed stage venture is a meeting intensive business. In many ways, meetings are the lifeblood of your brand. And, without a doubt, my schedule has never been handled more efficiently, accurately, or without worry. As is the case with any assistant, there are some hiccups now and again. Most were at the beginning as I trained the system to my needs and learned how to best interact with Clara.
When Founders come to my office for the first time, they often ask, "Where's Clara? I wanted to thank her for help." This is when I tell them that Clara's not human, she's a cyborg. And, a productivity tool I couldn't live without. Congrats and thank you to the Clara Team!
How does this compare to Amy and x.ai? I've been using Amy for the last year and she's been invaluable.
Clara is a brilliant product. Maran isn't exaggerating when she says "truly human interface" -- which is what makes Clara special.
There's a surprisingly huge leap from solving the mechanical problem of scheduling meetings (you can use a form on your end or the counterparty's, or a series of bulleted options, or a shared calendar, etc. etc.) to presenting a human interface that can accommodate nuance, natural language, and, frankly, real life. The first time you see Clara deal with a unexpected situation, you'll understand how meaningful that difference is.
Congratulations to Clara Labs on the launch!
Count me among those who were fooled during their initial interactions with Clara -- it wasn't until someone else (at a different company) also cc'd Clara that I started googling around :)
I've been a Clara customer - and advocate - for a few months now. Not only has the service been a great experience for me, but I've also received countless compliments from those who interface with my Clara to schedule meetings. I am a big fan of the continuously progressive approach that the Clara Labs team has taken to improving the service every day.
What a great job with this service! There is so much potential for an ai to be able to schedule not only meetings but all the redundant tasks any company or startup has to go through. I've been using Clara for a bit now, and I can tell you that it has increased my productivity and has gained me meetings I would never had gotten in the first place. Recently, someone told me "If there's one person you should be keeping on your payroll, its Clara. Her persistence was the reason you got the meeting!"
Congrats and looking forward to the future of Clara!
I've also been using Clara for most of the last year and am a huge fan of what they've built. I dislike going back and forth to schedule things more than almost anything and Clara has completely changed that.
I've just started using x.ai. Could anyone who has experience with both compare and contrast?
Looks like a great product. Congratulations on the launch. Excited to start using Clara!
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Well this is very interesting! Definitely looking forward to it. thank you for sharing.