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Microsoft just released a feature that kills my tool. What should I do?

Hi there IndieHacker Fam!

TLDR; Microsoft Teams just released a Premium version feature last week (https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/microsoft-teams-blog/intelligent-meeting-recap-in-teams-premium-now-available/ba-p/3832541) that basically provides exactly the same features in my product for an additional $7/user/month. I have lost sleep over this and tried to research more to decide whether I should totally pivot or keep going at it. I finally decided to reach out to the IndieHacker community to get some advice, constructive criticism or just some encouragement.

Background: I am working on an AI Transcription + Summary/Key Topic Identification + Analytics tool for sales and customer success teams in SMBs and startups. AI Transcription and Summary/Key Topic Identification is not new. Companies like Otter.ai, Fireflies.ai have been around for a few years. And of course with GPT-3.5 and 4 now, the key topic identification has become even easier to develop. My value proposition was to aggregate the data across calls and help sales and customer success teams give the most relevant data and urgent customer issues to the product and engineering team as quickly as possible (as a B2B software Product Lead, I know how mission-critical this is to developing software that customers want to pay for. Being quicker to prioritize and launch the right features = 10-30% increase in revenue per month).

Before the news was announced, I have been getting overwhelmingly positive feedback for such an AI tool that transcribes calls and recordings and converts them into actionable insights. I have spoken to dozens of prospects - who were not just keen (you know, the usual kind, friendly albeit patronizing 'OK sign me up!') but said things like: "Wow! I wish I could have bought this 6 months ago!", and got them on my Beta Tester list. In the recent few days, many people who I have pitched our tool to have been telling me about the Teams Premium 'Intelligent Recap' feature.

I won't say I didn't see this coming. But I thought I had enough time to build a niche, captive audience before it did. Here's some of my own analysis below:

Strengths:

  • Teams only provides info on a per-call basis, but does not aggregate this info into a proper team-based dashboard for let's say your head of sales or product to review. The features provided by Teams and potentially Google Meet and Zoom seem to be more centred around the call/meeting experience and gathering info from the calls + sharing it with team mates. It provides you with AI-generated tasks and notes but it does not deep-dive into insights across the teams like Talk Time Per Attendee, which is what we do.

Risks:

  • Now that Teams has released this, I am 99% sure Google Meet and Zoom will release their own versions. Doubling down purely on those AI Transcription, Summary, Key Topics features seems a lost cause for sure. Plus, I don't know how far they will go in terms of Call Analytics. It seems quite plausible they would have it in their roadmap some time in future.

Opportunities:

  • Not everyone uses Teams still, and also not everyone might upgrade to the Teams Premium Plan. Teams Premium Plan has been out for a while but doesn't seem like many startups or SMBs have subscribed to it.
  • Potentially, I could focus much more on the conversation/customer analytics aspect and invest more resources into integrating with all the Video Conferencing Platforms to perhaps pull their data, rather than ask users to upload it themselves into our platform
  • Another focus area that we have is to focus on AI tips while doing calls, meaning it will auto-generate prompts based on where the call is going. For eg: in a sales call, when a customer asks you a difficult question, the AI will be there to guide you with some potential answers -> But this also looks like its right up Microsoft's alley

I really am lost. I also wonder what other AI transcription SaaS companies are going to do about this (if anyone has any insights or been in similar situations before). All comments/roasts/feedback/encouragement welcomed T_T

on June 7, 2023