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Deep dive into Cisco Meeting Notes / Worklife product
Hi there! Thanks for asking for a deep dive into the Cisco Spark Meeting Notes (formerly Worklife) product., including details on key product features, user satisfaction, growth metrics, and the acquisition. The most useful sources I found to answer your question are various areas of Cisco's own websites, as well as digital intelligence from Similar Web, but I used a wide range of sources to look into all parts of your request. The short answer is that Heroik Labs, the original developer of Worklife, was acquired by Cisco in October 2016, with the Worklife product surviving as both Cisco Spark Meeting Notes and as elemental integration into the overall Cisco Spark Meetings offering. You will find a deep dive of my analysis below.
PRODUCT HISTORY (MEETINGHERO, WORKLIFE)
Heroik Labs was launched in San Francisco in 2014 by three co-founders: Dave Bryand, Val Agostino, and Dave Kashen. The company's first product was MeetingHero, later renamed WorkLife in February 2015.
According to Crunchbase, the company's seed funding amounted to $2.72 million over three rounds in Sept. 2014, Jan. 2015, and April 2015, with $120,000 of that coming from the company's participation in the Y Combinator Winter 2015 class. Worklife received positive press following its Y Combinator demo in March 2015, including the second-highest growth score from Mattermark.
Worklife aimed to provide a simpler approach to meeting collaboration, specifically designed for pre-meeting, during-meeting, and post-meeting agenda setting, notes, and task assignments. While the product was initially offered for free, optional paid subscriptions were eventually added.
ACQUISITION DETAILS
Cisco acquired Heroik Labs and Worklife in 2016, with the acquisition announced on October 17th of that year. Cisco classified the acquisition as a "technology and talent acquisition", for the purposes of integrating Worklife capabilities into Cisco Spark, the company's cloud collaboration platform. In an article on the acquisition, TechCrunch noted that Worklife's aims at bringing order to meetings closely aligned with Cisco's goals for Spark.
The financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed, though it was announced that the Worklife team would be folded into Cisco's Cloud Collaboration Technology Business Unit, reporting to Senior Vice President and General Manager Jens Meggers. Cisco also decided to offer both free and paid customers of Worklife continued access to the paid version for free.
Following the transition, Worklife became Cisco Spark Meeting Notes. As part of the Cisco Spark platform, elements of Worklife can also be seen in the Jan. 2017 release of Cisco Spark Meetings, which also incorporate parts of the company's WebEx product.
Cisco Spark is a key piece of the company's Collaboration unit, which accounted for 9% of Cisco's annual revenue in 2016. Using current revenue figures of $47.9 billion, the Collaboration unit is worth approximately $4.311 billion (47.9*0.09).
Only one of the three Heroik Labs co-founders appears to have stayed on at Cisco following the acquisition. Val Agostino is currently Director of Product with the company, working on integrating Worklife into Cisco's collaboration products.
KEY FEATURES
In order to provide an in-depth look at the features of Cisco Spark Meeting Notes, I used the product itself, so you will not find all of the details within the product page unless you sign up for free access.
Setting Meetings: Set meetings and invite attendees by email or via link. You can allow access to the meeting across three settings: open to anyone with the link, full access to anyone invited with read-only access for the full team, or restricted access only to invitees.
Setting Agendas: While you can create custom agendas for each meeting, a number of agenda templates are offered. Templates include weekly team meeting, daily standup, and even an "original MeetingHero" template.
Taking Notes: Note-taking is collaborative and occurs in real-time, with all meeting participants benefiting from having the same set of notes. Notes can include embedded action or task items.
Continuity: There are two continuity elements within CS Meeting Notes: 1. Setting an action item within the meeting notes will automatically remind assignees of the item before the next meeting. 2. Recurring meetings are linked together both visually within the application, allowing for easy tracking of progress, and under-the-hood, so that action item reminders will go out before the next meeting in a sequence.
Integrations: You can sync with Google Contacts to invite attendees via email. For calendar integrations, CS Meeting Notes works with both Office 365 and Google Calendar. You can receive daily calendar summaries and meeting alerts in both Cisco Spark and Slack. Meeting notes can be exported to Google Drive, while action items can be exported to both Trello and Asana.
KEY CUSTOMERS
The Meeting Notes website lists the following customers: Toyota, HubSpot, BMC Software, One Kings Lane, and Zendesk, and BrightRoll.
Siftery lists those same companies as customers of Worklife, as well as these four additional companies: credPR, Dewsly, Diamond Candles, Eyeware. For Cisco Spark, Siftery lists two companies as customers: Walmart and Bakken & Baeck.
I was also able to find that an executive at Mammotome, a division of Devicor Medical Products, is a current user of Meeting Notes.
USER SATISFACTION
Worklife was first featured on Product Hunt 3 years ago, when it was still MeetingHero. The product received 472 upvotes, with positive comments appearing in the discussion as recently as a year ago. On Capterra, Worklife has just one review, with a rating of 4/5 stars.
While I could not find reviews/ratings specific to just the Meeting Notes aspect of Cisco Spark, I was able to find a wealth of reviews for Cisco Spark itself. On G2, the product has 13 reviews averaging to 3.9 out of 5 stars. In the U.S. iTunes store, Cisco Spark has 297 ratings averaging 4.5 stars. In the Google Play store, the product has 1,173 ratings average 4 out of 5 stars.
GROWTH METRICS
As you might already know, iOS install and usage data is restricted to app developers/owners, but we can glean some limited information from the data that is freely available. On Nov. 1st, 2016, Cisco Spark was ranked 277th for business apps amongst iPhone users in the US App store. It is now ranked 289th.
In the Google Play store, Cisco Spark has 151,099 installs, with 5,164 installs occurring in March 2017, and is ranked #184 in business apps for the U.S. store.
Cisco Spark's website currently receives approximately 1.7 million visits per month, with the height of traffic during the last six months occurring in January, when the site received 2.2 million visits. The Meeting Notes subdomain of the Cisco Spark website receives 8.35% of the overall site traffic, or approximately 141,950 monthly visits (1.7*0.0835).
Based on the freely available information, it is difficult to assess how the acquisition of Worklife has contributed to overall growth of the Cisco Spark product. I encourage you to keep an eye out for the release of Cisco's 2017 Annual Report, which will likely include enough information to estimate year-on-year revenue growth for the Collaboration unit.
CONCLUSION
To wrap it up, Heroik Labs' Worklife was acquired by Cisco in October 2016 and integrated within the Cisco Spark platform. Worklife continues to be offered as Cisco Spark Meeting Notes, and has been integrated within the larger Cisco Spark Meetings offering. Key customers of the Meeting Notes product include Toyota and Hubspot, and user ratings for the overall Cisco Spark product remain positive.
I hope this helps! Thanks for asking Wonder. Please let us know if we can help with anything else!