For those that are new around here, this is weekly newsletter where I highlight new and innovative AI products that are worth exploring.

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Happy Friday! We’re back for a Product of the Week!

AI notetakers are everywhere these days. It’s not hard to see why—the promise of capturing every word, summarizing the highlights, and automating action items is a dream for productivity enthusiasts (or perhaps busy freelancers like me). To be honest, I’ve held back on covering this category of AI Products for quite a while. I nearly got away with it for a whole year! The reason? I hadn’t found a tool that truly excited me.

The landscape is crowded, and the spectrum of solutions is broad. Some notetaking apps hyper-focus on niche roles or industries, which is great for founders chasing targeted growth. But few tackle the core of the functional issue: meetings. Calls, video conferences, brainstorming sessions, status updates—they all need effective notetaking.

And Fellow.App is the one I found to do this right exceptionally well.

Rather than trying to be everything to everyone, it doubles down on making meetings more productive, actionable, and collaborative. After spending time with the tool, I can confidently say it’s more than just a notetaker; it’s a meeting powerhouse.

Let’s break down how Fellow.App stands out.

Meetings are central to so many professional workflows. Whether you’re a solo entrepreneur juggling client calls, a manager running weekly team syncs, or part of a cross-functional enterprise team, the need to stay organized during and after meetings is universal. For these users, it’s not just about jotting down notes. It’s about tracking action items, capturing decisions, and ensuring nothing slips through the cracks—without adding more work.

This is where Fellow.App shines. It’s built for those who live in their calendars and depend on meetings to drive progress. By focusing on pre-meeting preparation, real-time collaboration, and actionable follow-ups, Fellow solves the headaches of meeting management in a way that feels natural and genuinely useful.

The AI-powered productivity space has exploded, with notetaking apps leading the charge. From voice-to-text transcription to intelligent summarization, there’s no shortage of tools claiming to make your workday smoother. However, many of these tools focus on the “shiny” AI tricks while failing to address the everyday frustrations users face.

Meetings are a perfect example. While other apps might emphasize capturing a transcript or suggesting automated summaries, Fellow zooms out to address the full lifecycle of meetings—before, during, and after. This focus gives it a competitive edge. It’s not just about recording what’s said; it’s about making every meeting purposeful and actionable.

Fellow takes a holistic approach to meeting management. It’s not just a tool to take notes; it’s a comprehensive collaboration suite. By providing agenda templates, organizing notes in a collaborative environment, and helping users track action items, Fellow ensures meetings drive real value. What sets it apart is its emphasis on highlighting actionability. Notes aren’t just static documents, they become living conversation bites that naturally push your tasks’ progress. It’s designed to keep your conversations outcome-oriented.

Fellow’s user experience is polished and intuitive for the most part. The onboarding experience has been honed. On one side:

Sign-up +> install extension +> Give permissions +> Get going. 

Where things strain at the seams notably more is what comes afterward: to control the app’s behavior, there’s a few different places for settings to be calibrated correctly and overall the SaaS/Desktop UI does find itself to be very text-heavy. No, dark mode won’t save you from this overload 🤣 It’s really only after you give yourself some time for your eyes to adjust to the UI that you will find your way around, and see what all the buzz is about. An intentionally colorless UI with mounds of text does BEG for lots of shading, and drop shadows to help more clearly outline various spaces. If Fellow’s design team wants to keep it simple, they would do well to play with some kind of monochrome tiling so people’s eyes can be drawn naturally where they need to.

Overall I’m still of the opinion that Fellow delivers on its promise by addressing the core needs of meeting-related headaches with a mix of AI-powered features when relevant:

This end-to-end mentality is one I really enjoy, as it helps contextualize significantly WHERE your solution stakes its flag. This is another one of these things that makes Fellow such a compelling product. It’s not just about taking notes—it’s about smoothing your overall meeting experience.

Integrations Galore!

Fellow doesn’t operate in isolation, and its designers have made that clear. It integrates cleanly with Slack, Google Calendar, Microsoft Teams, and popular CRMs, and automation platforms. It’s kind of bonkers! 🤯 This makes it easy to pull meeting details, sync action items, and  move things along THAT much more smoothly. For people already relying on these tools, Fellow’s integrations feel natural and add significant value.

AI is deeply integrated into Fellow’s functionality. From speech-to-transcription features that capture every word to intelligent summarization that distills the key points, Fellow’s AI tools are practical and effective. The use of large language models (LLMs) combined with retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) techniques enables the tool to classify next steps and highlight actionable insights automatically. These copilot-like features help users focus on what matters most without getting bogged down in the details.

For what has become a very crowded market of AI notetakers, Fellow.App is a stand out pick in my opinion by focusing on its functional excellence at handling meetings. Its holistic design approach—from preparation to follow-up— coaches users in a more effective direction at so little cost. Yes, some freelancers or solopreneurs might view it as “overhead.” But in my opinion, it’s worth every penny. Trading a couple of Starbucks coffees each month for a tool that tailwinds your productivity? I’m here for it. And if you’re on the fence, here’s my referral link so you can try it at a discount and support this publication at the same time!
https://fellow.cello.so/1iM4c7dMJVu

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Stay well, and until next week.

-✌🏽 Sam