u/Born_Street5786

Hey r/betatests - I built ExtraBrain, and I’m looking for a small group of Mac users to test it before I keep expanding the beta.

ExtraBrain is a macOS app for people who want AI help during interviews, calls, user research, sales calls, or team meetings without inviting a recording bot into the call. The goal is a more private, Mac-native workflow: capture the session locally, get help while the conversation is happening, then turn the session into useful notes afterward.

What I’m especially looking for:

• People who regularly take notes during meetings, interviews, or calls
• Mac users who care about privacy and don't want another bot joining meetings
• People willing to give blunt feedback about onboarding, reliability, UX, and whether the notes are actually useful
• Bonus: people who already use tools like Notion, Obsidian, Apple Notes, or other “second brain” workflows

What testers get:

• Free early beta access
• A direct feedback channel with me, the builder
• Ability to influence the workflow before launch

What I’d like feedback on:

• Is the setup clear enough?
• Does the app feel trustworthy/private enough for real meetings?
• Are the live/helpful moments actually useful, or distracting?
• Are the generated notes structured in a way you would reuse?
• What would block you from using this regularly?

Requirements:

• macOS
• Willingness to test with real or realistic meetings/interviews
• If you want to test BYOK or local model mode, you’ll need your own supported API key or local model setup; otherwise, you can still test the core workflow if beta access is available for it

If you’re interested, comment with your use case or DM me, and I’ll send the beta access link. I’m affiliated with ExtraBrain - I built it - so I’m mainly here for honest beta feedback, not drive-by promotion.

https://extrabrain.app/

Founder here. I’m building ExtraBrain, a private macOS app for capturing and reusing the things you read, write, and think through during work.

I wanted to share a positioning lesson because I think it applies to many small SaaS/AI product builders right now.

When we first described the product, the obvious label was something like “AI notes” or “AI second brain.” It was technically accurate, but it created the wrong conversation.

People immediately compared it to every notes app, every chat wrapper, every Notion/Obsidian setup, and every “AI productivity” tool they had already tried and abandoned.

The more useful framing turned out to be much more specific:

The product is not really about storing notes. It is about reducing the cost of remembering what you already figured out.

That changed how we thought about the product in a few ways:

1. The competitor is not just another app. The real competitor is the user’s current habit: browser tabs, scattered docs, Slack messages, Apple Notes, half-finished drafts, and “I’ll remember where I saw that later.”
2. The value prop has to start with a painful moment, not a feature. “Save knowledge privately on your Mac” is a feature. “Stop re-solving the same research and writing problems every week” is closer to the actual pain.
3. AI is only interesting if it makes retrieval and reuse easier. A generic AI assistant sounds like a commodity. A memory layer that helps you bring back your own context at the right time is easier to understand.
4. Privacy is not a tagline; it affects who cares. For some users, local/private is a nice-to-have. For others, it is the reason they would even consider using the product for work notes, client research, or personal thinking.
5. The landing page should probably sell the workflow, not the category. We are experimenting with showing concrete before/after flows instead of saying “second brain” and hoping people project their own meaning onto it.

My current takeaway: if your SaaS is in a crowded category, category language can help people place you, but it can also make them stop listening too early.

For builders here: how do you decide when to use familiar category language versus describing the specific job your product does?

Not trying to sell in this post - mostly sharing the positioning problem because I suspect a lot of AI SaaS founders are dealing with the same thing.

Hey — I’m working on ExtraBrain, a macOS app I built because I wanted AI help during interviews and meetings without adding another bot/participant to the call.

Most meeting AI tools I tried felt like they were built around the meeting bot first: join the call, record everything, upload it somewhere, then give you a transcript later.

I wanted something more Mac-native and private: a local workspace that helps while the conversation is happening, then turns the session into useful notes afterward.

ExtraBrain is a Mac desktop app for:

- live interview prompts and structured answer support
- meeting notes while the call is happening
- post-session summaries, decisions, action items, and follow-ups
- working across Zoom / Google Meet / Teams because it doesn’t need to join as a participant
- choosing how you want AI to run: BYOK if you prefer using your own provider key, or local provider support including Gemma4 when you want more local control

The privacy/control part is important to me. I don’t want this to feel like a mysterious black box that silently sends everything to one required cloud provider. The goal is to make the model/provider choice visible: use your own key if that fits your workflow, or use a local option like Gemma4 when that is the better fit for sensitive calls or offline/local-first work.

It’s meant for people who want help staying sharp in real time, not just a giant transcript after the meeting is over.

Mac app: https://extrabrain.app