Installed to tryout it out. I dislike it requires yet another user account just to try it out[1][2].
Overall it is pretty simple to use with a decent UI and worked fine for my quick test of a Signal desktop app video call by selecting the mmhmm virtual camera in Signal.
It did not work in FaceTime as there is no way to change the camera from the built in one (however I was able to change the audio source to mmhmm audio fwiw). Not sure if this is a FaceTime limitation or mmhmm?
For £20 I would probably buy it but £10 a month (or £100 a year)?! No. Sorry.
I fail to see why this type of application needs to be a subscription service and a rather expensive one at that. Unless I am missing something it doesn't rely on a backend service the mmhmm developers would need to maintain and outside of adding new features it isn't likely the OS APIs used to access the camera will change much, if at all, on a desktop OS these days so on going development costs to the core camera functionality already present is likely to be minimal.
A nice product but not worth an indefinite £10 a month to me personally.
[1] Also there does not appear to be a delete account option anywhere on the website. I hate this when forced to sign up just to try the software. I have emailed using the address on their website to request deletion but it should be a clear option on the account management page.
[2] Also accepting an 8 character minimum (requiring upper, lower and special character) password while rejecting a 4 word (27 character) passphrase is laughable.
I feel like this is one of the great cases for a “residential” vs “commercial” model.
From a software dev perspective, I definitely understand the benefit of monthly/yearly subscriptions vs feast and famine cycles (with the hope that you can justify an upgrade to your users), but it.has.gotten.out.of.hand.
Some of your best customers start out bootstrapping and becoming experts in the cheapest (workable) solution. If you tell them they’re “too poor” for not wanting to pay your prices at the door, you just lose out.
With an excellent product, it’s even viable to have free tiers and then charge businesses $$$ (basically all past Windows software if you count piracy as free), or move to a Patreon/sponsorship model (Vue.js).
If you have to pay “cloud” costs, I get the struggle of giving it away for free, but if it’s all on-device? What’s your argument?
I don’t need an “argument” to charge a specific price or business model. I’ve created something and am offering it to anyone who will pay what I’m asking.
Why, as a customer, would you care about my “argument” for my price as opposed to the value it creates for you?
This product is expensive and I expect most people to walk away but I also see why they don’t want to go down the old Windows 3.1 route of a perpetual license.
>I don’t need an “argument” to charge a specific price or business model.
I disagree, you need to sell your business model just as much as you need to sell your product.
As a customer,
1. I need to know whether this is a fair pricing for the service, because I need to decide whether I should pay for it, or search (or wait) for an alternative. If it is overpriced, a cheaper alternative is likely to appear soon, and it is probably better to wait.
2. I want don't want to encourage business models that don't fit my usage, to avoid the proliferation of such business models across the industry.
Also, I will add that as a (potential or actual) customer: if I think your product is great, I want your business to succeed and for it to succeed it has to have a business model that is positioned for the long-term.
Flat out: If the model doesn’t work, I’m going to look for another alternative.
If the model does not work it could mean you go out of business, or “pivot” to private buyers, or lose focus and clutter the software with “upgrades” in an attempt to catch up. In each case it means the software would no longer work for me and I’d have to find an alternative anyway so I might as well find the alternative first.
I partly agree, as an author it is your software and your choice. Demanding anything (unless one has an existing relationship as a customer that warrants it) is probably a sign of feeling entitled.
Also these days I expect software to need security fixes for the lifetime of the software which is why I am somewhat less hostile to subscriptions than I would otherwise be.
But I also partly understand very well what the users upthread writes, so let me try to explain:
> I don’t need an “argument” to charge a specific price or business model. I’ve created something and am offering it to anyone who will pay what I’m asking.
Fine, go right ahead. Consider the posts upthread as an explanation for why they wont use your software and will recommend against it.
If people still buys it: Power to you. And, I should say, it looks like something that certain people will pay for
> Why, as a customer, would you care about my “argument” for my price as opposed to the value it creates for you?
Maybe they shouldn't care to write it, but at least now you know their reasoning.
"Why, as a customer, would you care about my “argument” for my price as opposed to the value it creates for you?"
Because I am a human with feelings, and if I _feel_ I'm getting screwed, you can prove to me all day long how I'm actually saving money, it won't matter because I'll find something else where I feel treated right (not that that's that easy these days).
Price and in particular an on going cost factors into the value a product provides. Positioning in the market via pricing and other factors are as much part of selling your product as making sure people know what it does. Customers will have an opinion on it and it will be something worthwhile to understand in the large. Further if the pricing raises eyebrows customers will want a justification to feel good about buying.
Ah it's not even free? That's misleading. Theres the option to download etc on their page but no results for "pricing". I hate that they try to make you invest in them first then you get shown the fee. I cant say I'm the biggest fan of false advertising or dark patterns against me.
Yea, and this is basically just obs with a webcam output and some built in assets, I'll just go ahead right now and donate their price to the OBS project.
As someone who has previously worked on real time audio apps on Mac, I find the price justified.
Supporting MacOS with anything that needs kernel drivers requires constant updates and the potential market is so small that it kind of needs to be expensive per customer or else you need to cut corners with the quality.
Windows has 5x the market share, so there you can sell for 80% less per user because you'll sell more licenses which compensates that. And a windows version for $2 per month sounds fair, so then $10 monthly on Mac is fair, too.
Why do you need kernel extensions for realtime audio on Mac? If anything, CoreAudio is a dream to work with compared to the shitshow of APIs on Linux and Windows.
Not to mention there are plenty of cross platform libraries for real time audio where you would never need to care about the difference.
Anything that needs to create input/output devices for routing into other apps “in the box” requires kernel extensions. I’ve heard some hack together more real time guarantees for performance purposes (mac os has a habit of regressing on audio stream stability) but most people who need that guarantee will build on an open source os anyway.
CoreAudio is great, but since everyone just uses cross platform libraries will rarely be utilized to its fullest.
You might be confusing this with the fact that Big Sur, on Apple Silicon, does not support x86 kernel extensions. It still supports them elsewhere, and it supports arm64 kernel extensions on Apple Silicon.
in most cases, tools with subscriptions do not need more maintenance than products with a one-time purchase (don't know anything about this specific case, so dunno if it applies here). It's just that after adobe/jetbrains and others opened pandoras box, slowly but surely more and more devs try to make their tools to a continuous income stream...
It get's really silly to the point that a snipping app has a yearly subscription (xnip), calendars have subscriptions (fantastical) and many other tools which once would have been a $20-$30 purchase all now want $3-$10 a month.
Personally I'm sick of it. I'd rather go back to the 'old days'...
GOG already does this for old games. But there’s a much bigger retro gaming following than there is a market sector for folk who just prefer older applications.
Typically also done by forcing some 'cloud sync' into it and then using that to justify the switch, moving control of your data into their hands and holding it hostage.
That was enough for me to ditch 1password in favour of bitwarden.
While I agree with you in general, this tool appears to rely on a kernel extension for their virtual Webcam. And that creates a lot of additional and ongoing maintenance work.
Tell them that's how it was done for decades and decades?
Plenty of successful software companies sell their software, instead of renting it.
Moreover, the billion dollar company I work for will not buy any software that requires a subscription, unless it's from Microsoft, Adobe, or another big name. If a program from Rando Joe's Softworks requires a subscription, the company will tell the employee to find another solution.
I completely understand your point of view of charging for the resources needed to get the work done, but the market does not really care for this and you need to charge what the clients are willing to pay for your product.
If clients are willing to pay less than the value of the resources necessary to build and maintain the product, you have either a communication problem (you're not showing the right value to your clients), or a market fit problem.
All the account creation friction sucks, but I'll defend the price. It's a subscription because the value you get depends on how long you use it. Making the price incremental (vs e.g. a one time $100 charge) means more people can try it and get value for a limited time, and only keep it if it continues to add value for them.
Is $100/yr too much? A b2b sales team might spend $400 getting a first meeting with a customer, and $10k more over the course of further meetings. A 1h internal meeting with 10 people might cost thousands in wages. If mmhmm makes a handful of meetings marginally more effective it will pay for itself.
If the product works but the price doesn't, you may not be the intended buyer.
Most non-consumables can be rented (and frequently are) just for this reason. We buy things when our use expends or transforms the product (e.g. a house) so that we don't have to coordinate with the owner.
It's nice to be able to buy outright (or download free!) things that we want to maintain, but most software doesn't fit that for most people.
But if the product is ok and useful at a cost which users to not want to pay, it’s just a matter of time before equivalent features get integrated into video calling platforms directly.
They have a recording functionality that generates interactive videos (as a person watching, you can still move the presenter around and jump to specific slides and images). So they might offer online hosting for your productions, à la YouTube or SlideShare?
If the people who develop this app are here, it took me quite a while to figure out that it uses a "virtual camera" to work, and therefore potentially works with most videoconferencing software. That should be front and centre - for a while I wasn't sure whether it was a separate videoconferencing app because the screenshots are just the app, rather than it being used in Zoom or whatever. The only reference is "Funner Zooming", but for some reason that wasn't explicit enough for me without an example Zoom screenshot.
It's not just you. I looked around for a bit, then bounced and figured someone in HN comments would mention what this is. And while I appreciate that the name is not another -ly -fy or -r or something with umlauts, "Mmhmm" is just... really bad.
Even after opening the link I couldn't shake the feeling it had something to do with that awful Mmm Mmm Mmm Mmm song from Crash Test Dummies, I hated that song and I hate this app even though they are evidently not connected after all.
Speaking of music, this app's name made me think of the album MMHMM by Relient K, which has a hidden track also called MMHMM (at the beginning of the CD).
I actually thought it was a well made parody site, funner zooming/mmhmm, the bs marketing speak. On further inspection it actually looks like it could be useful in presenting slides, like a corporate obs or something.
I guess I'm old too. Unless you're presenting to children, I'm not sure who wants this. Adding funny visual gags to your content isn't going to do much for me except make me annoyed with you.
If you have something worthwhile or compelling to say, that will stand on its own.
Well "presenting to children" is a big market now. 2020 has brought a lot of different kinds of people online, it's not just developers or people in corporate sector anymore. These days my kids hangout on Zoom every single school day, which is way more than I have ever been in a virtual video conference in my life.
The gags are placeholders for actual presentations. Essentially the service allows people to watch you and your presentation at the same time, which is superior to only one or the other.
In time, it should allow you to present a more professional presentation. It's essentially the difference between 2010 & 2020 YouTube videos.
No thanks, I don't want to watch slides mangled by video compression tuned for a camera. I'd much rather see them through screen sharing, which is optimised for compressing on-screen content without making it look terrible.
This should just be a feature of Zoom, Teams, etc. And it probably is.
Wait, "Funner Zooming" is a reference to Zoom meetings?
I saw the phrase next to the bouncing down arrow and I thought it meant that when I scrolled down, things would zoom around on the screen. Or something.
Perhaps my mind had been primed for that by this discussion from the other day:
It honestly did not occur to me that the phrase had something to do with Zoom meetings. I use Zoom nearly every day but I'd never heard of Zooming before.
I missed that discussion yet had the same trouble grokking the phrase. Even after watching the video and sort of understanding what they do it didn't click until I read your comment.
But then again, I rarely use Zoom since my company is beholden to Gsuite.
I looked through almost their entire site and halfway through these comments here before I realised this WASN'T a competitor to Zoom/Skype/etc. The website completely and utterly makes it look like video conferencing software, to the point where I was digging through their pages trying to find out if it was encrypted or what their back end was for the streaming.
For a product about presentation, their presentation needs a lot of work.
Also the price is utterly ridiculous. When I thought it was a full video conferencing suite I was on the fence about it "possibly" being worth USD$10/mth, but as a pure virtual-video-editor it's maybe worth $20-40 once-off and definitely not worth any form of subscription.
Yeah, I scanned the landing page, then scanned the "Product" page, and couldn't figure out of this was an add-on to Zoom, or a competitor with Zoom. That absolutely needs to be made clear right at the top.
I played with Mmhmm during beta. It's a simpler to use OBS, from what I can tell. It's good for some laughs.
They just came out of beta and announced that it would cost $9.99/month. I was pretty shocked to see a recurring fee for such a simple app, which, from what I could tell, offers nothing new over a long establish FOSS project. It strikes me as more of a one time $10 purchase. Would really like to hear how they justify a recurring cost on this.
I'm sure they justify it with a pile of evidence that people are willing to pay that much. Folks here are probably just not the target market (would just use OBS and hack together whatever, or be confused about what value having our face on top of our slides would even have...).
OBS performance on my 2018 model MacBook Air is so horrible that I never use OBS on it.
But I think that is only a temporary problem kind of. And don’t know if Mmhmm would perform any better on it.
The new MacBook Air and Pro models with the M1 chip on the other hand I think from what I have heard make video encoding really fast. Would love to hear from anyone using OBS on one of these models, which machine you have and how OBS has been for you.
I do a lot of online meetings, and make regular internal presentations about our engineering work to the rest of the company. I have used OBS, and it does work, but it is complex enough and fiddly enough that operating it distracts me from my presentation.
This mmhmm app lets me do the key things OBS does – shrink myself to a corner of the window, with my presentation taking up the whole screen, jump to a live demo while keeping me in the corner — more simply, so that it is not a distraction to what I am presenting or demoing.
I use it every week. I work remotely, so these meetings are how I present myself at work. In that context, $10 a month is nothing; it doesn't even merit a second's hesitation.
I've used this and it's a great idea, and works well in some contexts.
One downside to be aware of is that it routes your slides/screenshare through your webcam video feed.
In some apps (e.g. Teams) this can dramatically reduce the quality of the slides, relative to a 'normal' screenshare.
There's a setting in Teams to increase video bandwidth, which mitigates this a bit. But the slides will still look less good (at least, that's what people have told me).
There's also a mix of compatibility - generally if you access the video conference in your web browser it works (because the browser can see the 'software' webcam they've set up), but the software webcam is inaccessible in some desktop apps.
I think you are missing a (killer!) feature they rolled out during the beta: the "SHARE THIS" window.
They let you present a window that includes whatever is in your mmhmm video feed. It is the same content as your virtual mmhmm camera, but it comes across as a presentation, in higher resolution so the other participants can read your slides.
It is also very easy to find in apps like Meet when you use the "Present Now" function, because the window title is all-caps "SHARE THIS". :)
(The window doesn't appear on the screen, but it does appear in apps that let you present — I have tried it with Meet and Zoom.)
I've tested it as well (seeing it on the latest Apple keynote) and have been having quality issues even when sharing slides via share screen, which is what they recommend if there's quality issues. Submitted a ticket around a week ago and haven't heard back yet.
Really excited at the possibility here. Staying tuned...
I tried this during the beta. Unfortunately, as others experienced, the resolution is severely limited in certain applications (I used Zoom). Zoom compresses the stream as if it’s video, when it’s in fact a slide.
I discovered this when I was setting up for a very important presentation and had about 5 minutes to go to a fallback plan. I was pretty upset that there was no warning about this, since they were totally aware of it, and it completely undermined the value of using it in a live presentation.
Later, I had to record a presentation to submit for a conference. I used it there and it worked fine in terms of quality. But even though I had bought a green screen, there were difficulties that resulted in subpar edge detection. I had to change my shirt multiple times to create enough contrast, and I had to use a background image that was ‘busy’ enough to mask the static that was visible.
Maybe things have improved in the last couple months, but I was pretty let down when I tried this out.
I had done many dry runs in advance and knew it would not crash. The presentation window looks very crisp in this mode and does not at all indicate that it may be illegible fuzz when used with (arguably) the most popular videoconf platform.
MmHmm is by Phil Libin, the erstwhile founder/CEO of Evernote[1]. I stumbled on it when looking up old connections for something I'm doing now. Here is a video of Phil introducing MmHmm[2]. In my very limited and a few interaction with him, I found him to be a kind person, and was super responsive to a small guy when he was very busy, and around its peak with Evernote (2010-2011).
While waiting for MmHmm's invite, I got invited to try Around[3]. I haven't tried MmHmm but it seems to share similar features with Around. I find Around nifty while pitching prospective customers but rather too-much-ado for, say, our team meetings - face-to-face visual meetings with audio.
After a while, all the bells and whistles wares down and we want to just stay at the basics. Just my thoughts from our small team's experience.
At a recent video-only conference I "attended", one of the presenters used what I only now see is the Around software.
It /sounds/ neat, and the AI framing is interesting, the presenters head bobbing around was so distracting that I could barely keep focused on the content. It was recorded, so sadly he could not do anything about it as we were seeing it, and the chat box was full up with people asking him to turn it off.
I like this approach. Everything it does can be achieved by OBS with a couple of plugins, but this is a very user-friendly packaging of great looking presets: use cases over technology. Also, super fun name.
I asked someone in a stream what app they were using, and it took a long explanation to describe that it was "mmhmm". They couldn't say it, they literally had to spell it out.
The naming process often boils down to balancing a decision matrix of objective and subjective trade-offs between positives and negatives for a given scope, audience, market and requirements (legal, perceptual, cultural, linguistic) as well as constraints (time, money, creativity). These tend to be priced in different, 'currencies' and individual preferences that are challenging to reconcile.
As someone who has done quite a bit of pretty successful product and company naming, the choice "Mmhmm" has quite a few negative aspects which I consider to be fairly important, though not requirements.
* Hard to only hear first then spell correctly.
* Hard to only read first then pronounce confidently.
* Hard to find when searched, even in combination with other likely terms (e.g. video, streaming, app).
* Can be confusing when introduced as a new-ish term in conversation.
* Such a notably 'unique' name can trigger discussion about the name itself which can lead to distraction or delay in communicating the product's value prop (as seen in the first third of their own intro video).
* Even for those who may find it "clever" or "cute" initially, it will likely become annoying over time for those in the company as well as the company's most valuable stakeholders.
Against that, the upsides don't appear (IMHO) to be a good trade-off.
* Short
* Quick to say
* Unique
* Memorable (at least on the verbal dimension, if not written)
I like webcamoid but it has memory leaks on mac. I have 64gb so I only discovered this when using it for a production use case where it was open for over an hour. It was not fun scrambling to restart it every hour while live.
Just one data point: I gave webcamoid on macOS a try a few weeks ago. When I finally understood how to configure it, it worked for about 5 seconds before the stream froze. I think I only tried on Signal.
My 2 cents to add is please use this sparingly unless you're intentionally being humorous. When altering what would normally be reality, less is much, much more.
I've gone to a couple online networking events recently and there's always some people with video modifications that turn them into an unbelievably tacky advert.
Something tangentially relevant to this, it is curious how this epidemic is forcing rapid change that was resisted for many years, and some of that change I suppose will stay. Companies resisted remote-working, educational institutions were very lukewarm towards remote classes/degrees, now all of that is the new normal. It is not a perfect comparison but this reminds me of the sweet changes during and just after WW2. It seems society needs a kick in the butt from time to time shake things up.
Interestingly, “needing a kick in the butt to shake things up” is a kind of antifragile-ness property of our society, but not the good kind of antifragile where the system adapts in a certain direction based on what kind of kicks its environment supplies, just a dumb kind where any kick is sufficient to speed up the inevitable.
Quick thoughts about it. I hope the authors read these comments and make something more integrated. It's not because it's funny that I will waste my time duplicating slides that I already made using ppt/gslides/keynote.
Other remarks:
Good:
- Seems fun to use and build things, liked the humor
Needs improvement:
- UI could be cleaner, the nagging about free premium takes a huge part of screen real state
Bad:
- No support to use google slides, powerpoint or keynote. If you think I will spend time redoing my slides in your tool, forget it. It just made me so pissed off that I deleted the app from my mac right away.
- Pricing should be transparent. No free tier (even with a watermark) is a huge bummer.
- Performance in older macs is subpar. My video slurred a lot in a 2015 Macbook 12'
On a business level, the only happy future I see is if they can eat into Zoom’s market share by giving away a superior presenter tool and then switch to being a conferencing platform themselves.
If they can’t, Zoom and others will add the same features if a large number of people find them valuable.
So I’m baffled that they are trying to monetize this already especially since they recently closed ~$30mm. Happy to hear other opinions.
Linux is a quagmire, but latency problems on OBS boil down to needing a fast computer, with a powerful graphics card to encode, and carefully configured audio (the default pulseaudio setup is usually a problem). Using JACK or similar will fix a lot of trouble, but really you just need horsepower to process video at HD resolution in real time.
In my experience (on Mac), OBS is pretty fiddly and has some sharp edges. While editing layouts, I have to make some changes twice because they don't "stick" the first time.
I agree about the pitch and video. I can't tell if this is a business application that would give me more control over my meeting presentations, or if this is targeted for casual fun and/or streamers.
I started using emojis in business email 6 months ago after not using them for my entire 20+ year career. Why? They convey tone better than any carefully crafted sentence.
next time you wonder if you are encountering overt age discrimination, remember how your own words and actions were the things that actually disqualified you
I used this app for a while, interesting concept but didn't quite do it for me.
One thing worth mentioning: it's a bit tricky to uninstall. Still appears as a camera in your system after uninstall. Had to go in manually and delete a bunch of preferences.
Am I the only one who thinks this is a terrible name to help a product spread? I can't even imagine myself saying "I am using mmhmm for this effect" to my colleagues. They would be like "what was that you said?"
The coolest feature is kind of hidden away in its support article[1]:
> A Screen share slide is also a great way to show the screen of your iPhone or iPad to quickly demo an app, for example. To use your device in a Screen share, first plug it into your computer, then select it with “Add Screen Share”.
This potentially provides an easy way to use your far better iPhone camera as an external webcam for your Mac.
Super fun. Mmhmm folks - some marketing tips: the entire landing page says nothing, provides no information. Then the abstract value prop but we have no idea what it is until we're many seconds into a video - even then it's not clear.
'What it is' needs to be clear very quickly or people won't go any further and 'Makes your Zoom calls fun' is not 'what it is'.
Finally, the video gets showcase pretty fast, with so much exemplary items, please just within 10 seconds explain what it is, give some basic examples.
"Funner Zooming" being the biggest most-emphasised bit of text would normally make me click away immediately, but since this is HN, I gave it the benefit of the doubt. But then I kept looking and still had no idea what it was. Turns out, it's a macOS app for adding live effects to your camera. Why is that not on the front page and above the fold???
Interface is great, I’d pay for “easier OBS” to reduce cognitive load when presenting a dynamic presentation (I’ve used mmhmm for conference talks and sales and investment pitches).
Why I don’t use mmhmm is the CPU load, compositing screen share and running green screen significantly impacted my MacBook Pro load. Fix this and I’m back in.
Sweeten the deal - multiple slide decks running concurrently.
I use mmhmm to share my screen as a camera in Zoom--this lets me share both my face and the text editor I use for meeting agendas in a way that lets everyone else see each other instead of just my shared screen.
That said, screen sharing hasn't worked since the app update released on the 16th and I'm finding it impossible to get a response from mmhmm's support (or anyone that works there, honestly).
I used mmhmm today to record a quick demo [1] and think it works really well for that. I like the looks a lot more than the normal rectangular overlays in Zoom or ScreenFlow.
I've been using it for the few last days, doing onboarding for new employees.
So far I really like both how easy it is to record the sessions with it, as well as how I can quickly switch between sharing my computer screen and iPad screen (using AirServer).
A nice addition being that the recordings will contain my head talking in the corner of the screen.
I tried OBS studio, but could not figure out how to use it properly. Ended up using Xsplit Vcam instead, which is really good.
I think I managed to remove the background in a really, really crud way with OBS studio. Like using a chroma key (green screen). But Xplit does it with any noisy apartment background.
Helping people do better remote meetings and presentations more easily seems pretty meaningful in the context of the present pandemic, where millions of people are suddenly having to do that (for the first time, in many cases).
Tried out mmhmm in beta, very cool. I deleted the app because I can't share my screen in zoom to show presentations easily. Its somewhat useless if that is not integrated properly.
I absolutely loved this, and I will show it to my boss in a couple of hours, who I already know will like it more than me.
This is a game changer for online workshops and conferences, if not anything else for the ability to prepare several "shared screens" and switch between them as if switching between presentation slides.
The only feature I was surprised is not included is the ability to "save" the video size and position for each slide, so it automatically appears in the right place, out of the way.
The music on the demo video sounds really off, like it’s coming from a cheap radio. I’m watching/listening on my phone, but other things don’t sound that way on these speakers. It sounds shrill and tinny.
Engagement metrics, click ratios and all this fricking noise - I want us to go back when watching the History channel on TV was actually about History. There are a handful of video content producers on the internet that I can watch without getting my blood pressure out of control.
All of the terms that you used are admirable and woefully missing today. It's unfortunate. But it speaks to the times that we are living in. This comment is probably being downvoted because people may argue that this "mmhmm" app isn't a prime example of your thoughts, but you have a point.
Either way, the whole "Funner Zoom" line is off-putting, if the problem isn't to be exemplified by the app as a whole, your point can at least be made in regard to that piece of it.
Overall it is pretty simple to use with a decent UI and worked fine for my quick test of a Signal desktop app video call by selecting the mmhmm virtual camera in Signal.
It did not work in FaceTime as there is no way to change the camera from the built in one (however I was able to change the audio source to mmhmm audio fwiw). Not sure if this is a FaceTime limitation or mmhmm?
For £20 I would probably buy it but £10 a month (or £100 a year)?! No. Sorry.
I fail to see why this type of application needs to be a subscription service and a rather expensive one at that. Unless I am missing something it doesn't rely on a backend service the mmhmm developers would need to maintain and outside of adding new features it isn't likely the OS APIs used to access the camera will change much, if at all, on a desktop OS these days so on going development costs to the core camera functionality already present is likely to be minimal.
A nice product but not worth an indefinite £10 a month to me personally.
[1] Also there does not appear to be a delete account option anywhere on the website. I hate this when forced to sign up just to try the software. I have emailed using the address on their website to request deletion but it should be a clear option on the account management page.
[2] Also accepting an 8 character minimum (requiring upper, lower and special character) password while rejecting a 4 word (27 character) passphrase is laughable.
From a software dev perspective, I definitely understand the benefit of monthly/yearly subscriptions vs feast and famine cycles (with the hope that you can justify an upgrade to your users), but it.has.gotten.out.of.hand.
Some of your best customers start out bootstrapping and becoming experts in the cheapest (workable) solution. If you tell them they’re “too poor” for not wanting to pay your prices at the door, you just lose out.
With an excellent product, it’s even viable to have free tiers and then charge businesses $$$ (basically all past Windows software if you count piracy as free), or move to a Patreon/sponsorship model (Vue.js).
If you have to pay “cloud” costs, I get the struggle of giving it away for free, but if it’s all on-device? What’s your argument?
Why, as a customer, would you care about my “argument” for my price as opposed to the value it creates for you?
This product is expensive and I expect most people to walk away but I also see why they don’t want to go down the old Windows 3.1 route of a perpetual license.
I disagree, you need to sell your business model just as much as you need to sell your product.
As a customer,
1. I need to know whether this is a fair pricing for the service, because I need to decide whether I should pay for it, or search (or wait) for an alternative. If it is overpriced, a cheaper alternative is likely to appear soon, and it is probably better to wait.
2. I want don't want to encourage business models that don't fit my usage, to avoid the proliferation of such business models across the industry.
Also, I will add that as a (potential or actual) customer: if I think your product is great, I want your business to succeed and for it to succeed it has to have a business model that is positioned for the long-term.
Flat out: If the model doesn’t work, I’m going to look for another alternative.
If the model does not work it could mean you go out of business, or “pivot” to private buyers, or lose focus and clutter the software with “upgrades” in an attempt to catch up. In each case it means the software would no longer work for me and I’d have to find an alternative anyway so I might as well find the alternative first.
That answer comes from you, not the content producer. He's said what he considers fair, for him. You need to decide if it's fair, for you.
Also these days I expect software to need security fixes for the lifetime of the software which is why I am somewhat less hostile to subscriptions than I would otherwise be.
But I also partly understand very well what the users upthread writes, so let me try to explain:
> I don’t need an “argument” to charge a specific price or business model. I’ve created something and am offering it to anyone who will pay what I’m asking.
Fine, go right ahead. Consider the posts upthread as an explanation for why they wont use your software and will recommend against it.
If people still buys it: Power to you. And, I should say, it looks like something that certain people will pay for
> Why, as a customer, would you care about my “argument” for my price as opposed to the value it creates for you?
Maybe they shouldn't care to write it, but at least now you know their reasoning.
Because I am a human with feelings, and if I _feel_ I'm getting screwed, you can prove to me all day long how I'm actually saving money, it won't matter because I'll find something else where I feel treated right (not that that's that easy these days).
Supporting MacOS with anything that needs kernel drivers requires constant updates and the potential market is so small that it kind of needs to be expensive per customer or else you need to cut corners with the quality.
Windows has 5x the market share, so there you can sell for 80% less per user because you'll sell more licenses which compensates that. And a windows version for $2 per month sounds fair, so then $10 monthly on Mac is fair, too.
Not to mention there are plenty of cross platform libraries for real time audio where you would never need to care about the difference.
CoreAudio is great, but since everyone just uses cross platform libraries will rarely be utilized to its fullest.
It get's really silly to the point that a snipping app has a yearly subscription (xnip), calendars have subscriptions (fantastical) and many other tools which once would have been a $20-$30 purchase all now want $3-$10 a month.
Personally I'm sick of it. I'd rather go back to the 'old days'...
Desktop apps were mostly better, and were all much faster on the rpi than native alternatives are on my recent $2700 laptop.
Edit: modernize = app store for abandonware + docker-alike for dos instances.
That was enough for me to ditch 1password in favour of bitwarden.
Is this even needed on a Mac? Can't all Macintosh software just sync through iCloud, instead of relying on the developer's solution?
/ Serious question. I'm not a Mac software dev.
Should checkout Enpass. - Has google drive/dropbox/webdave sync connectors. - runs on android/ios/mac/linux/windows
Plenty of successful software companies sell their software, instead of renting it.
Moreover, the billion dollar company I work for will not buy any software that requires a subscription, unless it's from Microsoft, Adobe, or another big name. If a program from Rando Joe's Softworks requires a subscription, the company will tell the employee to find another solution.
If clients are willing to pay less than the value of the resources necessary to build and maintain the product, you have either a communication problem (you're not showing the right value to your clients), or a market fit problem.
The vagaries of doing real time audio on Macs don't have much weight on the price people will pay.
Is $100/yr too much? A b2b sales team might spend $400 getting a first meeting with a customer, and $10k more over the course of further meetings. A 1h internal meeting with 10 people might cost thousands in wages. If mmhmm makes a handful of meetings marginally more effective it will pay for itself.
If the product works but the price doesn't, you may not be the intended buyer.
Isn’t that true of all things you purchase?
It's nice to be able to buy outright (or download free!) things that we want to maintain, but most software doesn't fit that for most people.
- Be the star you are!
- Level up your presentations!
- Make high-quality video content in minutes!
- Direct everyone's attention!
What do you guys offer? Bullhorns? Public speaking training? Pro camera rental?
I feel like an old fart.
If you have something worthwhile or compelling to say, that will stand on its own.
In time, it should allow you to present a more professional presentation. It's essentially the difference between 2010 & 2020 YouTube videos.
This should just be a feature of Zoom, Teams, etc. And it probably is.
I saw the phrase next to the bouncing down arrow and I thought it meant that when I scrolled down, things would zoom around on the screen. Or something.
Perhaps my mind had been primed for that by this discussion from the other day:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25191802
It honestly did not occur to me that the phrase had something to do with Zoom meetings. I use Zoom nearly every day but I'd never heard of Zooming before.
But then again, I rarely use Zoom since my company is beholden to Gsuite.
For a product about presentation, their presentation needs a lot of work.
Also the price is utterly ridiculous. When I thought it was a full video conferencing suite I was on the fence about it "possibly" being worth USD$10/mth, but as a pure virtual-video-editor it's maybe worth $20-40 once-off and definitely not worth any form of subscription.
They just came out of beta and announced that it would cost $9.99/month. I was pretty shocked to see a recurring fee for such a simple app, which, from what I could tell, offers nothing new over a long establish FOSS project. It strikes me as more of a one time $10 purchase. Would really like to hear how they justify a recurring cost on this.
But I think that is only a temporary problem kind of. And don’t know if Mmhmm would perform any better on it.
The new MacBook Air and Pro models with the M1 chip on the other hand I think from what I have heard make video encoding really fast. Would love to hear from anyone using OBS on one of these models, which machine you have and how OBS has been for you.
I do a lot of online meetings, and make regular internal presentations about our engineering work to the rest of the company. I have used OBS, and it does work, but it is complex enough and fiddly enough that operating it distracts me from my presentation.
This mmhmm app lets me do the key things OBS does – shrink myself to a corner of the window, with my presentation taking up the whole screen, jump to a live demo while keeping me in the corner — more simply, so that it is not a distraction to what I am presenting or demoing.
I use it every week. I work remotely, so these meetings are how I present myself at work. In that context, $10 a month is nothing; it doesn't even merit a second's hesitation.
https://obsproject.com/
https://github.com/obsproject/obs-studio
One downside to be aware of is that it routes your slides/screenshare through your webcam video feed.
In some apps (e.g. Teams) this can dramatically reduce the quality of the slides, relative to a 'normal' screenshare.
There's a setting in Teams to increase video bandwidth, which mitigates this a bit. But the slides will still look less good (at least, that's what people have told me).
There's also a mix of compatibility - generally if you access the video conference in your web browser it works (because the browser can see the 'software' webcam they've set up), but the software webcam is inaccessible in some desktop apps.
They let you present a window that includes whatever is in your mmhmm video feed. It is the same content as your virtual mmhmm camera, but it comes across as a presentation, in higher resolution so the other participants can read your slides.
It is also very easy to find in apps like Meet when you use the "Present Now" function, because the window title is all-caps "SHARE THIS". :)
(The window doesn't appear on the screen, but it does appear in apps that let you present — I have tried it with Meet and Zoom.)
Really excited at the possibility here. Staying tuned...
I discovered this when I was setting up for a very important presentation and had about 5 minutes to go to a fallback plan. I was pretty upset that there was no warning about this, since they were totally aware of it, and it completely undermined the value of using it in a live presentation.
Later, I had to record a presentation to submit for a conference. I used it there and it worked fine in terms of quality. But even though I had bought a green screen, there were difficulties that resulted in subpar edge detection. I had to change my shirt multiple times to create enough contrast, and I had to use a background image that was ‘busy’ enough to mask the static that was visible.
Maybe things have improved in the last couple months, but I was pretty let down when I tried this out.
Thanks for your concern though!
While waiting for MmHmm's invite, I got invited to try Around[3]. I haven't tried MmHmm but it seems to share similar features with Around. I find Around nifty while pitching prospective customers but rather too-much-ado for, say, our team meetings - face-to-face visual meetings with audio.
After a while, all the bells and whistles wares down and we want to just stay at the basics. Just my thoughts from our small team's experience.
1. https://evernote.com
2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c8KhKBLoSMk
3. https://www.around.co
It /sounds/ neat, and the AI framing is interesting, the presenters head bobbing around was so distracting that I could barely keep focused on the content. It was recorded, so sadly he could not do anything about it as we were seeing it, and the chat box was full up with people asking him to turn it off.
It's kind of bad for discovery.
Still, it's blowing up.
I made the opposite conclusion from your anecdote.
> it took a long explanation to describe
This strikes me as a good thing for this sort of product.
As someone who has done quite a bit of pretty successful product and company naming, the choice "Mmhmm" has quite a few negative aspects which I consider to be fairly important, though not requirements.
* Hard to only hear first then spell correctly.
* Hard to only read first then pronounce confidently.
* Hard to find when searched, even in combination with other likely terms (e.g. video, streaming, app).
* Can be confusing when introduced as a new-ish term in conversation.
* Such a notably 'unique' name can trigger discussion about the name itself which can lead to distraction or delay in communicating the product's value prop (as seen in the first third of their own intro video).
* Even for those who may find it "clever" or "cute" initially, it will likely become annoying over time for those in the company as well as the company's most valuable stakeholders.
Against that, the upsides don't appear (IMHO) to be a good trade-off.
* Short
* Quick to say
* Unique
* Memorable (at least on the verbal dimension, if not written)
* The domain was apparently affordable.
But a subscription? £10 a month? No thanks. _Maybe_ £5 max.
That price is competing with stuff like Xbox Game Pass Ultimate, Netflix, HBO and many others that give me hours of entertainment every day.
[0] https://webcamoid.github.io/
I've gone to a couple online networking events recently and there's always some people with video modifications that turn them into an unbelievably tacky advert.
There's a good simple product idea hidden somewhere in this website.
You basically have to watch the video to figure out the product.
The product looks great, by the way.
Other remarks:
Good:
- Seems fun to use and build things, liked the humor Needs improvement:
- UI could be cleaner, the nagging about free premium takes a huge part of screen real state
Bad:
- No support to use google slides, powerpoint or keynote. If you think I will spend time redoing my slides in your tool, forget it. It just made me so pissed off that I deleted the app from my mac right away.
- Pricing should be transparent. No free tier (even with a watermark) is a huge bummer.
- Performance in older macs is subpar. My video slurred a lot in a 2015 Macbook 12'
If they can’t, Zoom and others will add the same features if a large number of people find them valuable.
So I’m baffled that they are trying to monetize this already especially since they recently closed ~$30mm. Happy to hear other opinions.
the pitch seems jarring
but other people seem to have corporate workplace uses for it and that's a bigger audience so maybe have at it!
imo, mmhmm is simple and is really good for presentations in my experience, so perfect fit for corporate workplace crowd
On Windows I have tried OBS VirtualCam https://obsproject.com/forum/resources/obs-virtualcam.949/
Both of them work very close to real time for me.
Maybe your computer lacks hardware acceleration?
Probably the same people that include emojis in business emails.
Probably the same people that would include emojis in IRC messages.
One thing worth mentioning: it's a bit tricky to uninstall. Still appears as a camera in your system after uninstall. Had to go in manually and delete a bunch of preferences.
> A Screen share slide is also a great way to show the screen of your iPhone or iPad to quickly demo an app, for example. To use your device in a Screen share, first plug it into your computer, then select it with “Add Screen Share”.
This potentially provides an easy way to use your far better iPhone camera as an external webcam for your Mac.
[1] https://help.mmhmm.app/hc/en-us/articles/360056971194
https://appleinsider.com/articles/18/03/26/tip-record-your-i...
'What it is' needs to be clear very quickly or people won't go any further and 'Makes your Zoom calls fun' is not 'what it is'.
Finally, the video gets showcase pretty fast, with so much exemplary items, please just within 10 seconds explain what it is, give some basic examples.
That said, screen sharing hasn't worked since the app update released on the 16th and I'm finding it impossible to get a response from mmhmm's support (or anyone that works there, honestly).
[1] https://twitter.com/mkvlr/status/1331630391233564676
So far I really like both how easy it is to record the sessions with it, as well as how I can quickly switch between sharing my computer screen and iPad screen (using AirServer).
A nice addition being that the recordings will contain my head talking in the corner of the screen.
I think I managed to remove the background in a really, really crud way with OBS studio. Like using a chroma key (green screen). But Xplit does it with any noisy apartment background.
https://www.xsplit.com/partners/obs
This space is witnessing a lot of innovation and disruption and time is also ripe to do so.
Hoping to see AR/VR bring next wave of disruptions.
"Mmhmm is the newest product by All Turtles, a mission-driven product studio that works to solve meaningful problems worldwide."
Didn't know backgrounds for Zoom are meaningful problems that need to be solved.
That's a pretty strong presumption that that is what this software does.
https://wiki.uqm.stack.nl/Mmrnmhrm
This is a game changer for online workshops and conferences, if not anything else for the ability to prepare several "shared screens" and switch between them as if switching between presentation slides.
The only feature I was surprised is not included is the ability to "save" the video size and position for each slide, so it automatically appears in the right place, out of the way.
Yes, do this on iOS or Android or Electron.
Edit: perhaps with some difficulty for the last hop to a virtual device on Electron, to be fair.
Note: OBS is not hard at all, so I might be looking for something less CPU/GPU intensive
Engagement metrics, click ratios and all this fricking noise - I want us to go back when watching the History channel on TV was actually about History. There are a handful of video content producers on the internet that I can watch without getting my blood pressure out of control.
Either way, the whole "Funner Zoom" line is off-putting, if the problem isn't to be exemplified by the app as a whole, your point can at least be made in regard to that piece of it.