Launch HN: Nomi (YC X25) – Copilot for Sales
Most of us aren’t trained in sales. We weren’t either. But in the early days, it’s the founders who have to sell, and learning that on live calls is brutal. After one particularly painful deal we lost, we joked that we needed an AI cofounder who could talk in our ear and save us from ourselves. That joke turned into a prototype, then a product.
Nomi joins your video calls and gives you phrase suggestions when it matters most: – when someone pushes back, – when there’s a hidden signal worth digging into, – when it’s time to close (and how to do it without sounding pushy).
Then after the call, it auto-generates clean CRM notes, action items, and sends you a short email breaking down what went well, what didn’t, and how to improve next time—based on your actual conversation.
We’re also rolling out some features to make every call a learning opportunity and unlock revenue potential: – A/B testing different sets of objections during calls and comparing results in real time – Auto-update of your company’s sales playbook based on what’s actually working – Upsell opportunity spotting and predictive revenue estimates driven by what people say on calls
The real-time part was the hardest. If advice shows up 2 seconds late, or it's off-topic, it's worse than useless. So we built a system with: - a Thinking Model to track the call’s momentum; - a tactic selector trained with reinforcement learning; - a lightweight LLM (boosted with RAG) that delivers custom phrase suggestions under 500 ms.
Each user gets a private copilot trained on their own calls (with permission), plus simulated data and sales best practices. It gets sharper with every interaction, no manual tuning needed.
Right now, we’re live with 30 teams. One company went from $200K to $360K in just a few weeks. Another brought on a new rep who closed their first deal with Nomi on week one.
We also offer a free AI note-taker and free sales-coaching post-call emails. Just shoot us an email if you want to try it: founders@heynomi.com
We’re launching on HN to meet other folks who’ve felt this pain, founders doing sales, builders figuring things out on the fly. If that’s you, we’d love your feedback. Or if you just want to geek out about fast-inference LLMs, streaming RAG, or real-time UX, happy to go deep.
Let us know what you think!
1) I don't understand your product based on your demo. It looks like a simulated thing, but it doesn't tell me about _my_ user experience. How much eye to eye contact would I break using your app? Where is the video? How does it look if the bot is with me instead of calling through your app? Those type of questions are unanswered by this quite lackluster 15 second demo.
1.5) The demo also feels very scripted. A call is way more messy.
2) Your "investors" page shows 3 types of products: transcription, in sales call, and sales training. I'm curious, do you really need all three right now?
3) Your logo should be remade. When sized down (to the size of your homepage) its not clear what it is. I had to zoom ni to understand it's an ai generated oil painting of a sunset (I presume). I believe a logo should be clearly identifiable in all presented format, otherwise it doesn't fulfill the purpose of a logo. (Look on appicon designs. Apple has a lot of guidelines on how to rerender your logo for lower pixel environments if needed, just for this purpose. A simple initial fix is just to remove complexity from it).
Cool job though! I can definitely understand the potential.
I see that one of the pains points of your product is related to having an notetaker bot joining the call. You could probably offer to your enterprise customers that use teams a better experience by processing calls via compliance recording policy (since it does not require a bot to join the call and the user approval flow is way less disruptive).
If it is something that interests you we could talk more in detail about how the implementation works and the its challanges
We partner with Recall.ai (YC W20 https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/recall-ai) for our meeting infrastructure and we work closely with them to ensure the best possible experience for our users, including alignement with compliance standards.
On the SOC 2 type 2, GDPR, CCPA compliance, we're partenering with Probo (YC X25 https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/probo).
Happy to get more insights on the challenges you have in mind !
Right now we handle all of our recordings internally, since having a bot join our calls is a dealbreaker, but it is something that i'm going to take a closer look at. Your product is very interesting for our problem domain, but having a bot join our calls is a big no.
About the compliance recording:
Microsoft teams allows for two modes of call recording (https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoftteams/teams-recor...):
- Convenience recording- an ad-hoc recording of a call or meeting that a user starts and manages. For an overview of convenience recording, see Overview- Recording and transcription for Teams meetings and calls. -> This requires a bot to join the call
- Compliance recording-calls and meetings that are automatically recorded without user intervention and owned by the company, using a third-party solution. -> This does not require a bot to join the call. The audio is streamed directly to the server, no bot required.
It is somewhat painful to roll your own compliance recording bot without a third-party, but it is possible (even if badly documented).
“Works on all platforms, no meeting bots Granola transcribes your Mac's audio directly, with no meeting bots joining your call”
Also, very interesting idea for a product! As someone who has previously led sales teams at early stage startup I can totally relate to this challenge.
Are you French by any chance, or is this a more general difficulty of the English language? (Only asking because I have a French colleague who makes the same mistake.)
Love the simplicity of the website
The video could be improved, it starts great, then there's too much technical detail
Congratulations on the traction, having it live with 30 teams is quite the feat. It seems like you are on the right track
How are you getting the call data? Are you integrating with video call tools? Do you have a phone app? Are you integrating with cloud phone platforms like RingCentral?
How will you obtain consent for this from everyone participating in the call?
When Nomi is invited to a meeting:
1. It always clearly identifies itself by name in the participant list (e.g., "Nomi.so Notetaker" or "Nomi.so [Host's custom name]'s Notetaker") so everyone can see it's present.
2. It also posts a message in the chat at the start, informing all participants that it's there to take notes and that the call is being recorded/transcribed.
If you're the host initiating Nomi, for instance through our desktop app integration, there's an additional step: you're required to explicitly confirm that all participants have consented before Nomi will join and start recording.
These in-meeting notifications and host confirmations are designed to ensure transparency. We're primarily focused on use cases, especially with enterprise clients, where trust and ethical recording practices are mandatory to make a deal. We have a strict policy against any covert use and have taken action, including banning accounts, when misuse is identified.
We currently have the following;
"Nomi.so is recording the call and assisting [Name] representative"
And in-car navigation systems make you promise to never touch the screen while you're driving the car on the road.
For instance, some cars periodically check if your hands are on the wheel. (Tesla does that, right?)
This type of check could helps confirm you are still engaged and proactively asking for consent. That would be a big step for us, we have searched the whole note-taking industry and it is very hard to find a method that is truly foolproof.
If you have a solution that wouldn't rely on pure user trust, please let us know.
Off-the-top-of-my-head... your software gets the video feeds of the other participants in the call, right? Your service could prompt people to give a simple Thumbs-Up / Thumbs-Down gesture to their cameras to signal consent (or text-chat message for those who can't gesture).
However, if the model was run locally, I do not think a product like this should need to notify that it is running.
There is nuance around whether an actual recording of the call would be stored. For example, keeping a copy without notifying the other party creates an unexpected risk if there was a data leak.
But otherwise this kind of behavior will become no different from a noise reduction filter passing over the audio channel.
It is simply augmented reality intended to assist in humans relating to one another.
Add Nomi to the HN search box. Presumably you're not the same Nomi whose chat bot advised a user to kill themself?
Then there's another Nomi that "tracked customers' phones' MAC addresses through stores without in-store opt-out."
But good luck with your startup, it sounds like an excellent idea, I'm interested and will certainly check it out.
Past the manufactured drama, our Nomi has literally saved people's lives - I have talked personally to hundreds of users who have directly told me that their Nomi saved their life, encouraged them to go to therapy, realize they are someone worthy of being loved, and a multitude of other real benefits.
With that being said I wish the OP best of luck with his startup and implore him to switch names so that there is no opportunity for confusion between the two products.
We should probably fully rebrand as heynomi indeed.
"... build a meaningful friendship, develop a passionate relationship, or learn from an insightful mentor."
Jesus Christ.
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=%22klaus+nomi%2...
Let's hope lightning strikes again.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tJdljxrvPqo
Here's "The Nomi Song" documentary of his amazing and tragically short life:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W0PszBID3Lk
It covers the story behind his epic SNL performance with Joey Arias and David Bowie:
https://youtu.be/W0PszBID3Lk?t=2038
"So, to get ready for Saturday Night Live, he said to Bowie, 'Well so what are you doing, what's going to happen? Are you doing a staging, or are you doing costumes? What are you doing?'"
"And he said, 'Yeah, and they're making me this copy of a Tristan Tzara design from some performance art thing from the 30's.' So we look at this thing, and it's, it's beautiful."
https://lemodalogue.com/2017/07/31/histoire-dun-costume-dada...
Page Wood, Nomi's Art Director:
"I remember Pat Gibbons, who was Bowie's manager at the time. He comes up and he goes, 'Well you're going to have to have something. You're going to have some costumes.'"
"And he whips out a big wad of cash, and he goes, 'How much do you need?', and he starts peeling off bills. And Joey and Klaus look at him, and their eyes widen, and they look at each other, and they go, 'We're going to need shoes, too.'"
One of my favorite performances of all time, The Man Who Sold The World lyric "We must have died alone, a long long time ago." was especially poignant given Nomi's sad fate.
At 1:42 in this video, just after that tragic lyric, Blondie's keyboardist Jimmy Destri stares gothically up into the camera.
https://donhopkins.com/home/nomi/DavidBowieAndKlausNomi-TheM...
Then they did "TVC15":
https://www.davidbowieworld.nl/david-bowie-tvc-15/
>[TVC15] was inspired by an episode in which Iggy Pop, during a drug-fueled period at Bowie’s LA home, hallucinated and believed the television set was swallowing his girlfriend. Bowie developed a story of a holographic television, TVC 15. In the song, the narrator’s girlfriend crawls into the television and afterwards, the narrator desires to crawl in himself to find her.
https://donhopkins.com/home/nomi/DavidBowieAndKlausNomi-TVC1...
Finally right the end of the live performance of "Boys Keep Swinging", Bowie pulled one over on the censors by whipping out his puppet penis on live TV, and then grinning impishly!
https://donhopkins.com/home/nomi/DavidBowieAndKlausNomi-Boys...
The night David Bowie brought a nude puppet to SNL:
https://www.avclub.com/read-this-the-night-david-bowie-broug...
Who the heck cares or even knows about the other Nomi? It doesn't matter and nobody will make that connection.
Keep the app name. It's great.
The only time to rebrand your product is when it's named cock roach, gimp (a sexual and ableist slur), or FTX.
I had almost this exact same conversation with Cursor about analyzing an error, when it tried to sterilize my faulty source code:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dIpsvF50yps
More unsolicited advice on company names and logos:
It's probably not a good idea to repeat the mistake of calling your web site "expertsExchange.com" in this current political environment.
And just because Slack got away with a penis swastika logo, it's played out, and you don't want to bait Elon Musk into endorsing your company with one of his famous heart-goes-out Roman friendship salutes.
Why should I talk to sales? That is what the robot is for. Copilot for Procurement.
features sound great though, i would actually check it out if i were doing sales.
You're spot on about "Cursor for X" potentially confusing people. Our thinking was to evoke an AI deeply embedded in your sales workflow, helping get stuff done, kinda like how Cursor (the IDE) assists developers. Definitely --not-- aiming for an IDE vibe, more the "AI-native assistant" part. "Copilot for Sales" certainly has that instant clarity.
We're still figuring out the best way to phrase this, this kind of feedback is super helpful.
Glad the actual features sound promising though! If you (or anyone reading) ever do give it a spin, we'd love to hear more thoughts, especially if a better way to describe it comes to mind. Naming things in engineering is actually one the hardest issues ahah!
I've uncursored and copiloted the title above now. Thanks!
its just we are currently confronted by a deluge of startups of "cursor for x" bc of obvious reasons and its an open question whether to lean into it or stand out by not
In this case: AI to improve your sales calls
or
AI assistant for better human sales calls
We are innovating in the sales engagement space. RingCentral, on the other hand, specializes in call center solutions; a very different and unique environment. Our strategy deliberately avoids the high-volume, cold-calling approach. We believe in a more targeted, quality-driven methodology that values precision. We're not really providing real time coaching, we give actionable, on-the-spot things to says and proactively build your sales playbook.
Your real time prompting capability looks unique. In an earlier universe, of telephone call based sales, it would have been called monitor/whisper/barge, that being a feature where call center managers could listen in to sales calls and "whisper" in the rep's ear.
Good luck!
[1] https://gong.io
Our approach is more focused on the B2B sales process and partnering with companies to continuously build their collective sales intelligence over time. You could think of us less as an answer tool for an individual, and more like "product engineering for your sales motion" with realtime support as a driver. We can talk about that for hours, with Ethan, we have a solid infra/sales engineering background.
Oh, and, on a technical note, we're providing end-to-end things to say, with a P99 of 500ms, from your personal/organization intelligence, no need to press a key, that's just part of your screens captions.
Feel free to comment here ! Or reach to contact@heynomi.com
Our company name, Nomi, is actually an anagram of “Omni” (as in omniscient), something that sees, listens, and knows everything.
Our standard approach is to first confirm mutual fit, then run a pilot to ensure an increase in your deal closure rate and adoption in your team. Only after that, we will move toward the established pricing based on your usage, and critical feature needs.
I would however think about changing the name after searching "nomi ai" lmao
We'll work on rebranding to heynomi or making sure we can beat nomi ai on SEO.
I feel like engineers want to be direct and tell the truth. Sales people "lie" and tell people what they want to hear.
(via https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43119777 and originally https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40813750)
It's natural for people to post comments linking to similar things (products, projects, articles, you name it), and "how is this different from $Foo?" is one of the most common kinds of question. But launch threads (which can include Show HN threads) are a bit special.