A year ago we launched Char as an AI meeting notetaker. We came out the other side believing the framing was too small.
The question was never how do you capture a meeting? It was what happens to everything that flows from it — the decisions, the follow-ups, the half-thoughts in the margin — and who carries it forward?
That is the part we rebuilt around.
What we learned
We spent the year making nearly every mistake available to an early-stage founder. We shipped 21 versions, swapped storage layers mid-flight, removed features users relied on, and watched 200 of our earliest adopters churn out instead of upgrading. Most of it worked. Some of it broke trust. All of it taught us the same thing.
Meeting notetakers are a solved category. Granola just raised at $1.5B. Otter, Fireflies, Fathom — they all do transcripts and summaries. The feature set is converging. Competing on transcript accuracy is a race to parity.
It got more obvious when Zoom, Google Meet, and Teams started shipping their own notetakers. Trying to out-transcribe the conferencing platforms themselves is foolish. Folding their output into something with continuity and acting on it — that's the move.
But every day we hit the same wall: the meeting ends and everything scatters. Three action items got spoken out loud. A design decision got made. Someone said "let's circle back on pricing". Then you open Slack, open Linear, open your notes app, and try to manually reconstruct what matters.
You have a task manager, a notetaker, and a CRM. They don't talk to each other. Every tool has a piece. No tool has context across all of them.
The handoff problem
The meeting is only the beginning of the work. The real tax comes after, when you have to remember what mattered, decide where each follow-up belongs, and move it into the next tool without losing the thread.
That handoff is where good intentions go to die.
You spend hours triaging — organizing, remembering, routing. Not the work itself. The work around the work.
How Char solves it
Char starts with meetings and ends with everything that flows from them. The core is the daily note.
Your daily note assembles itself. You finish a call and action items land in today's note, not in a separate meetings tab. The work happening on your computer flows into the same timeline. Quick thoughts go there too.
One place for the day.
Tuesday's note has context from Monday's. Thursday's meeting note references a decision from Tuesday's. When you ask "what did we decide about pricing?" Char doesn't search a folder of files — it traverses a graph of context that's been building for weeks.
From the outside, Char looks like a notepad. It is actually a place where agents can pick up work without making you leave the page.
Type a checkbox, and Char can research, draft, or schedule the next step. You approve what leaves.
A meeting notetaker gives you a record of what was said. Char remembers what was decided, connects it to what came before, and gives the follow-up somewhere to go.
What's available today
Char ships with the daily note as the home screen, meetings woven directly into it, and the first agent handoffs from checkboxes. SQLite migration and folders land this month. Cloud sync is here. The CLI is bundled — same data, two interfaces, native for humans and agents alike.
We're opening this in private alpha. I'm onboarding every user personally for now.
If you've ever finished a long day of meetings and wondered where it all went — try Char.