Observer
AI companion for meetings and work.
The past two weeks weren't about shipping the biggest feature.
They were about understanding why people weren't converting.
After talking to potential users, I realized I was asking for too much upfront.
For a desktop app, the flow looked like this:
Download the app
Sign in
Grant permissions
Pay for a subscription
That's a lot of trust to ask for before someone has experienced any value.
So I introduced a 30-minute free trial (no credit card required). Now anyone can install Observer, use it in a real meeting, and decide if it's worth paying for.
I also spent time rethinking the brand.
The website has been completely redesigned, and the app now has a much cleaner, more consistent look and feel. I wanted Observer to feel less like "another AI wrapper" and more like a polished desktop product.
On the product side, I shipped:
🔗 Notion integration
🔐 Private Vault with encrypted meeting titles
📍 Clickable citations that jump to transcript moments
🔄 Meeting notes regeneration
💳 Better pricing, discounts, trial tracking, and billing UX
⏳ Meeting usage limits and countdown warnings
⚡ Faster navigation and a lot of UI polish and bug fixes
Stats
32 commits
2 weeks
1 solo founder
One lesson I've learned is that users don't just evaluate features.
They evaluate how much effort it takes to experience those features.
Reducing friction has probably been a bigger improvement than any individual feature I shipped.
Now the next challenge begins: getting Observer in front of more people and collecting real feedback.
https://getobserver.app
Today is the day.
After months of building, debugging, redesigning, and countless late nights, Observer is officially live.
Observer is an AI Desktop Companion for Meetings & Work that runs directly on your desktop instead of joining meetings as another bot.
Current features
✅ Real-time AI answers using live meeting transcripts
💡 AI assistance with both meeting and screen context
📝 Automatic meeting recaps with action items
🎙️ Live transcription
⌨️ Keyboard-first workflow
👀 No meeting bots—just AI on your desktop
I built Observer because I wanted AI to feel like a companion instead of another participant in every meeting.
Today is only the beginning.
I'm looking for honest feedback—good or bad—and I'll be shipping improvements continuously.
If you're on macOS, I'd love for you to try it.
Thanks to everyone in the Indie Hackers community who's shared feedback throughout the journey. It genuinely helped shape the product. ❤️
Tomorrow is launch day for Observer.
Before making it available to everyone, I wanted people to be able to see exactly how it works instead of just reading about it.
The full product demo is now live on the website.
If you have a few minutes, I'd really appreciate your feedback on:
The landing page
The product positioning
The onboarding experience
Anything that feels confusing or missing
Tomorrow, Observer officially launches.
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The most interesting part here is not the transcription or the recap, it is the trust model. A desktop companion feels a lot less intrusive than another meeting bot, and that matters because people decide very fast whether an AI tool belongs in a live call.
I would watch one metric closely, how often people come back for the second and third meeting. Launch day interest is useful, but repeat use will tell you whether this is a real workflow or just a strong demo.
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Great to see a product team focusing on real user feedback before launch. A clear demo and smooth onboarding can make a huge difference in how people understand and adopt a new product. Wishing Observer a successful launch — excited to see how the community responds!
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Thanks Tim. Observer is live now. You can download the app or watch the demo here: https://getobserver.app
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One thing I'd pay attention to is whether the demo helps people understand what Observer does or why they would keep using it. Those are different questions, and the second one usually has the bigger impact on conversion.
I've been building Observer, an AI companion for meetings, and one thing has surprised me more than anything else.
I went into this thinking the biggest challenge would be choosing the right AI model.
It wasn't.
The biggest challenge has been latency.
When someone asks a question during a meeting, you don't have 10 seconds.
You have maybe 2–3.
That means the model is only one piece of the puzzle.
Every stage matters:
Capturing the screen
Compressing images
Streaming and transcribing audio
Building context
Model inference
Rendering the response
I've found that shaving 300ms from multiple parts of the pipeline often improves the experience more than switching to a newer model.
Users don't tell me, "The reasoning is amazing."
They tell me, "That was instant."
For anyone building AI products:
Have you found latency to be a bigger challenge than model quality? Or has your experience been the opposite?
I'd love to compare notes with other builders.
Note: Waitlist open at getobserver.app. Launching soon.
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This comment was deleted 2 months ago
A few months ago, I noticed Cluely moved its undetectability feature into a separate $150/month plan.
I'm not saying the pricing is wrong. AI inference, infrastructure, and support are expensive.
But it made me realize something.
There are a lot of students, job seekers, indie hackers, freelancers, and professionals who want an AI meeting companion but simply can't justify enterprise pricing.
Instead of complaining, I spent the last few months building Observer.
It's a AI companion that provides:
Real-time meeting assistance
AI answers using meeting context
Live transcription
Meeting notes & recap
No bots joining your meetings
Invisibility on screen sharing and more...
Join the waitlist and be the first to get notified when its goes live.
I'd love to hear:
Do you think there's room for a more accessible alternative?
What feature would make you switch from your current workflow?
Early access: https://getobserver.app
Today I launched the website and early-access waitlist for Observer, an electron based macOS AI companion for meetings and work.
The goal is simple: help you stay focused in meetings with AI-powered answers, meeting notes, and recaps—all in a fast, native macOS experience.
I'm looking for honest feedback before opening access to everyone.
Does the idea resonate with you?
What's the first feature you'd want to try?
What would make you join the waitlist?
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I will love to write an article about your product on our platform. Please mail me; ceo@roipad.com
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Congrats on shipping the waitlist! The "stay present in the meeting" framing is smart — most AI meeting tools fail because they become a second screen you're glancing at, which defeats the point. Curious how you're handling latency for real-time answers without it feeling laggy or intrusive mid-conversation. Also, native macOS is a good call — the Electron meeting-assistant space is crowded, but genuinely fast and lightweight is still rare there.
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Thanks! Really appreciate it.
Latency has honestly been the hardest part of building Observer. A lot of it came down to picking the right models for the job instead of always using the biggest one. I also spent a lot of time iterating on prompts and reducing unnecessary context so the models have less to process. Those optimizations ended up making a much bigger difference than I expected.
Right now, responses are typically around 2–3 seconds in majority cases, which feels fast enough to be useful during a live conversation, though I'm still trying to shave more time off.
And good catch on the native macOS mention—that was my mistake in the blog. Observer is actually built with Electron. I've updated the post now.
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The idea resonates, the shift from more tabs to staying present in the meeting is the right framing. First feature I would want to try: the recap quality after a meeting with a lot of cross-talk and interruptions, that is usually where AI note-takers fall apart.
I do product testing and walkthrough videos for early tools, once you have something installable I would be glad to run it through a few messy real meeting scenarios and give you honest feedback on where the recap holds up. Following this for when access opens
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Thanks for the thoughtful feedback, Obasekore—I really appreciate it.
You can request early access on the Observer website (it's completely free). I'll be sending regular updates to everyone on the waitlist, and I'm planning to launch later this month.
Early access users will also receive a special launch discount. Looking forward to hearing your thoughts once you get a chance to put Observer through those messy meeting scenarios!
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What stood out to me is that you're optimizing for staying present rather than taking better notes.
Meeting assistants often become another screen competing for attention. If Observer helps people participate more while remembering everything afterward, that's a much more compelling job for the product.
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Thanks! That's exactly the problem I'm trying to solve.
I don't want Observer to become another thing you have to watch during a meeting. The goal is to let you stay fully engaged in the conversation while Observer quietly captures the context and gives you a reliable answers.
If that resonates with you, feel free to request early access on the Observer website. It's free, and I'll be rolling out access and launch updates very soon. Early users will also get a special launch discount.
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Appreciate the reply.
Reading it made me think about one implication of the direction you're taking that I don't think I can explain properly in a thread without oversimplifying it.
If you're interested, what's the best email to reach you on?
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