3
kinds of meeting it had to handle
9 mo
free, in exchange for product feedback
3
feature requests from our own workflow
The job
We take notes on three kinds of meeting: ad hoc calls with vendors, due-diligence calls with advisors, and in-person due-diligence meetings on the road. Our note taker was going out of business, and I was asked to find its replacement.
It had never been good where it mattered most. In person, notes sometimes didn’t save, the on-device transcription missed what people said, and lunch meetings never worked at all. So the question wasn’t just which app, it was why in-person kept failing.
Half of it was a hardware problem
The best transcription in the world can’t recover a voice the microphone never picked up. Across a restaurant table, a laptop mic is simply too far from the advisor. Better software alone was never going to fix that.
The options
A dedicated recording device
Buy the hardware, then pay again for minutes and a business plan.
It solves the microphone, but you pay twice — once for the device and again every month for transcription minutes — and the device only ever does one thing. It felt like a bad deal.
Software on the laptop’s own mic
Fine on calls, the same failure in person.
For video calls this works well. Across a table it recreates the exact problem we were leaving behind.
Software plus an external mic
What we chose: good software, a good mic, no minute caps.
An external microphone carried on due-diligence trips, paired with a software note taker. No per-minute billing, and the mic is useful for plenty besides meetings.
Why Granola
It doesn’t send a bot into your meetings. On calls with advisors, an unfamiliar attendee joining to “record” is its own small problem, and Granola simply doesn’t create it. It also has an API and an MCP server, so notes can flow into the other tools and AI workflows we use rather than living in one more silo.
Then they asked what I thought
After we set the team up, Granola’s team reached out for product feedback. I did a few sessions with them — our requirements, what had gone wrong with the old tool, how our three kinds of meeting actually run — and tested the product along the way. In exchange they gave us nine months free.
What I’d change
Some of these I raised with Granola in our feedback sessions. The rest came to me afterwards, from using the product day to day, and several are gaps from the in-person side where our old tool failed.
Mute my side, keep the call
In a cubicle, it transcribes the people around me.
Granola can stop and resume transcription, but that stops the whole thing. What I needed was to mute only my microphone when I’m not talking, while it keeps capturing the call. It’s more than tidiness: the colleagues in the next cubicle never agreed to be in my notes.
One-click export to PDF
Getting a transcript out today means copy, paste, save.
Teams often need to keep a transcript alongside a record — in a CRM, a deal file, a compliance archive. Right now that’s copying it, pasting it somewhere, and saving it. A single export button turns three steps into one.
Templates chosen by rules, like mailbox filters
If the invite says “due diligence”, use the due-diligence template.
Today you pick a template by hand, and switching after the notes are written makes Granola generate them all over again. A rule on words in the calendar invite gets the right template the first time: the user saves a step on every meeting, and Granola pays for one AI generation instead of two.
Warn me while it’s going wrong
A live check that the mic is actually hearing the other person.
The worst failure for a note taker is the silent one: you find out the notes are empty after the meeting ends, when it’s too late to do anything. A quiet indicator when only one voice is coming through — or none — lets you move the mic while the advisor is still sitting there.
Tell speakers apart on the laptop too
In person, the whole table comes through one microphone.
As far as I can tell from Granola’s docs, the desktop app labels speakers as “Me” and “Them” by audio channel, and only the phone app separates voices in the room. With an external mic on a laptop, everyone at the table arrives on one channel. Bringing the phone app’s speaker separation to that setup would make in-person transcripts readable.
An opt-in bot for calls I can’t make
Keep botless as the default; let me send it when I’m double-booked.
Not having a bot in the call is why I chose Granola, and it should stay the default. But when I can’t make a group call, I still want the notes — and today that means asking someone else or keeping a second tool that can send one, the way Otter and Fireflies do. That second tool is how a competitor gets a foot in the door. An opt-in, clearly labelled attendee sent on my behalf closes it without giving up what makes Granola different.
Reminders for the next call
Private notes that resurface before a call, so the follow-ups don’t just sit there.
How many times have you come off a call and thought, “oh no, I should have asked about that”? The question was in your head a day earlier and gone when it mattered. Granola should let me attach a reminder to a future call that only I can see, and that I can choose whether to raise. I could add one by hand, or an AI tool could add it for me through MCP. It also fixes something that bothers me about the notes: after every call Granola pulls out the next steps, and then they sit at the bottom of the summary doing nothing. Offer them as reminders on the next meeting with that person, and the follow-up is in front of me when it counts.
How I’d measure it
- For us: meetings that end with a complete, usable transcript — especially in person, where the old tool failed.
- For Granola: in-person meetings captured per team, a use case most note takers handle badly and a reason to stay.
- Guardrail: people captured who never agreed to be — the cubicle neighbour, the next table at lunch. A mute that works should push this down.
Where I’d expect to be wrong
- A mic-only mute might confuse people who forget it’s on and lose their own half of a conversation. It may need to un-mute itself when it hears you speak.
- PDF export may matter less as more CRMs connect directly. It’s still the fallback for everyone whose tools aren’t on the integration list.
- I’m one team with one setup. Granola sees thousands, and some of what we hit may be specific to how we work.
Up next
A calendar you write, not type