Do was founded to help make meetings more productive, by providing a web-based platform for managing all participants’ notes, follow-ups, and action items in a single place online. But busy people aren’t always at their computers. To help those people, Do has introduced a mobile app that will enable users to access, modify and add notes to past, present or future meetings.
Do was launched over the summer as the first startup out of SherpaFoundry, the strategic advisory firm and startup incubator founded by Shervin Pishevar and Scott Stanford. It raised a total of $400,000 from investors that included Salesforce.com and SherpaVentures.
At the heart of the Do platform is a centralized place for participants to keep a record of things discussed during a meeting, or those that will be part of future meetings. It provides a dashboard for keeping track of upcoming events, as well as follow-up items and notes from meetings past.
So far, users from about 2,000 different organizations have tried out the platform, Do founder Jason Shah told me. And engagement has been pretty good: According to Shah, about 50 percent of users who manage a meeting with Do end up using it again within a week. As would be expected, that percentage increases over a longer time horizon.
But there was still a need to move beyond the browser, which is why the company built its mobile app. For one thing, not everyone wants to have their laptop open during a meeting. And for another, sometimes important notes come up when a user is away from their browser.
The mobile app isn’t much different — it has all the same core functionality built in, allowing participants to follow along or make notes as a meeting progresses. And as you would probably expect, it can work with various mobile calendars and leverages push notifications to alert users of upcoming meetings.
But the big killer app for Do’s mobile version is the “dictate” feature, which enables users to record a thought while on the go and have it assigned to the correct meeting. Whereas previously a user would have to wait until they got back to their desk to open up Do in the browser, they can now talk to the Do app whenever a relevant thought comes up.
