Tactiq: Putting meeting notes to work with AI

Solving the challenge of remote meetings

Back when Nick Nikolaiev was a child growing up in Ukraine, he built a simple self-learning machine using matchboxes and coloured beads. Nikolaiev was one of many nascent computer science aficionados who found inspiration in the books of Martin Gardner, the American mathematician who was a master at injecting a playfulness into the world of numbers. 

“Eventually it learns the winning combination and starts to play perfectly,” he explains. In conversations with his Tactiq colleagues, he discovered many of them were equally entranced by the same book. 

Tactiq was founded in Australia in 2020 by Nikolaiev and Ksenia Svechnikova. She previously worked at Atlassian and had become interested in how the company’s many meetings could be made more efficient. 

He worked in IT productivity solutions in Europe, the US and Australia. He was interested in speech-to-text technology, and familiar with the challenges around remote meetings. How could you capture and share information in the most useful way?

Big companies, and certain industries, had dedicated notetakers in meetings. But everyone else had to fend for themselves, forced to try and focus on the conversation while trying to record its most salient points. 

Add in the fact that everyone involved remembers the same meeting in a slightly different way, and communication can quickly break down.  

The enormous potential of AI

Nikolaiev and Svechnikova saw there was “enormous potential” to free up participants to focus on the meeting itself, and create a single source of truth. But more importantly, AI could make the meeting more useful, by pulling out key points and action items.  

“It’s not about the transcript,” he explains. “The transcript is a commodity. The conversation is a source of knowledge, so how do we move from implicit knowledge to explicit, unstructured knowledge to structured knowledge?”

Tactiq is an add-on to Google Meet, Zoom or Microsoft Teams. It provides a full transcript, but more importantly, detailed summaries, with relevant timestamps, and even conclusions and key takeaways.  

Svechnikova, whom he calls “superhuman”, designed, prototyped and coded the MVP in just a few weeks. Today, Tactiq transcribes and processes two million meetings every month, and is used in leading companies including Fortune 500 and ASX50. In October, the company secured $10million Series A funding from Flashpoint Ventures, with participation from Mucker Capital, Antler Elevate and Antler in Sydney.

The power of AI, and the pace of its development, is one part of this success story. But the other is the COVID-19 pandemic and its huge, sudden impact on the way we all work. Remote meetings became the norm overnight. 

“COVID was an accelerator,” says Nikolaiev. “The technology is a step function, but there should also be a behavioral part of the equation, some change that enables people to perceive a new type of behaviour as normal.” 

Rapid growth

Tactiq doesn’t just help companies communicate more effectively and more efficiently. It also makes meetings more accessible for neurodiverse people, and people who speak different languages.

It reached 10,000 users in a few months and Nikolaiev says its early growth was down to “lots of small things done in a very inefficient manner.” The co-founders would spend hours on Twitter, Reddit and YouTube, adding comments to relevant threads and videos promoting their new tool.

As a product-led growth company, they were laser-focused on understanding users, improving the product, and engaging with the community. They also benefited from a deep and nuanced understanding of SEO.  

“There is always a temptation of having a shortcut,” Nikolaiev says. “But all our efforts were around organic growth. We didn’t have any paid marketing for several years, and that was on purpose.”

When they did move into paid promotion, they found TikTok was a very powerful channel. 

For the launch of its new Chrome extension, they acquired more than 150,000 new users from just a $1,820 investment in influencers. The best-performing videos focused on solving specific problems – like too many meetings – for specific personas, like product managers. 

But there were unintended consequences too. A TikTok creator in Mexico saw one of the paid-for collaborations, made their own video, which went viral in Latin America, and drove thousands of new sign-ups. One problem – the Chrome extension didn’t support Spanish, so support tickets flooded in.   

It was a stressful incident, but also a good learning experience for the co-founders, who implemented more robust risk-checking around decision-making.   

“You have to engineer the organisation in a similar way you engineer your product,” Nikolaiev says. This applies to hiring new talent, and building the right performance-based culture. 

They are big on frameworks, for the whole company – like the Adizes Organisational Lifecycle framework – and for individuals, using Robert Kegan's Constructive Developmental Framework, and mapping personality traits using the Big5 OCEAN framework.. 

Although, Nikolaiev stresses, these are used as “tools to equip thinking structures, rather than step-by-step instructions.” 

Mapping out how individual roles will evolve is particularly important in an AI-driven era, where the pace of change is so rapid. 

Nikolaiev says companies need different characteristics – entrepreneurial, administrator, producer – for different stages of the organisation’s lifecycle.

They put a lot of thought into not just how someone can contribute now, “but also how this individual will be able to support the growth plans over the next six, 12 and 24 months.”

They also need people who can switch between the start-up mentality of hypothesis-test-learn, and areas that are more stable, where the “the main aim is not to break things.” 

“That doubles the level of complexity with hiring,” Nikolaiev says.  

As co-founders, they must also tailor their leadership approach from team to team across the 24-strong workforce, continuously supporting the 3x year-on-year growth.

“Different parts of the organisation are at a different level of maturity,” he says. “The biggest problem is that range becomes wider and wider.”

Building with Antler 

Tactiq took part in the Antler Residency in Sydney in 2020. Nikolaiev says both he and Svechnikova had separately heard good things about the programme. “It was very helpful because we were getting good references, in parallel, and from different directions.”

They saw in Antler “a very similar” philosophy to their own, and a mutual belief in “non conventional” business ideas and teams. Nikolaiev also praises the iterative nature of the Antler programme, and its ability to change in step with the market, new technology, and culture. 

Working with Antler has developed Tactiq’s understanding of the venture capital investor’s mindset, which Nikolaiev sees some of his peers struggling with as they move through funding rounds. 

“It’s been a good learning curve – there shouldn’t be any false expectations on this type of collaboration,” Nikolaiev says. “Then it becomes very efficient and results-oriented. Our overlapping skillsets bring mutually beneficial outcomes.”   

He also prizes Antler’s international standing. 

“They are very instrumental with supporting companies across the globe. And that gives them a different type of belief in what’s possible in different geographies.”