Founders and product managers
Meeting notes for founders that answer questions months later
Ghosty Notes records on your Mac, writes markdown files into a folder you own, and exposes your whole local history to Claude, ChatGPT or Cursor through an MCP server on the free tier.
Ghosty Notes runs on macOS on a Mac with Apple Silicon, and Intel Macs are not supported because the speech model runs on the device.
no notetaker in this list
what the other side sees while you record
The meetings that decide a startup are not the ones anyone writes up properly. Thirty customer discovery calls where you asked roughly the same five questions and got answers that only make sense side by side. The investor call where you promised a metric you now have to produce. The Tuesday where two engineers and a designer settled an architecture question in eleven minutes and nobody opened a doc. Six weeks later somebody asks why the system works that way and the honest answer is that no one remembers.
The job is not summarising a meeting. Any tool does that. The job is being able to ask a question across everything you have heard: which of the last twenty prospects mentioned procurement, what we told this investor about churn in March, when we decided to drop the second onboarding step and who argued against it. That is a search problem over a body of text, and it only works if the text exists, is complete, and is somewhere a tool can read it.
Ghosty Notes records through your Mac system audio with nothing joining the call, transcribes on the device, and writes plain markdown files into a folder you choose. Bot-free capture is no longer unusual, and the four tools above all offer some version of it; what is unusual is that the audio never leaves the machine to be transcribed. The MCP server then lets Claude, ChatGPT or Cursor read that history and answer from it. Both of those are on the free tier, over your full local history, and the notes are files on your disk rather than rows in a database somebody else runs.
What founders and PMs actually need out of a year of calls
Customer discovery is the clearest case. You run twenty-five calls over six weeks with the same rough script, and the value is not in any single call, it is in the pattern across them. Which objection came up eleven times. Which segment described the problem in words you did not use. Which feature request was really a pricing complaint. Doing that by hand means rereading twenty-five summaries, and summaries are exactly where the specific phrasing you needed has already been thrown away. With the full transcripts on disk and an MCP server over them, that becomes one question asked of a tool you already have open, answered from your own text.
Investor communication has a different shape and the same root. A quarterly update has to reconstruct a quarter: what you said you would do, what changed, what you learned, what you now believe. Most of the raw material was spoken. The board call in month one, the check-in where a lead investor pushed on a number, the hiring conversation that shifted the plan. Founders write these updates from memory and their calendar, and it takes a day. It takes less time when the quarter is a folder of dated markdown files you can query.
Product management adds the decision trail. The thing PMs lose is not what was decided, it is why, and who disagreed, and what the alternative was. Three months later the same question is reopened by someone new and the whole argument is rerun from zero because nobody wrote down that the alternative was tried and abandoned in week three. A transcript is a decision record you did not have to write. It is also, unglamorously, what you paste into a spec so the engineer implementing it can see the constraint in the customer's own words.
That is why file ownership is not an abstract preference here. Your call history compounds in value while your company is small and volatile: you change note tools, you change CRMs, you change stacks. Notes that are markdown files in your own folder survive all of that and can be read by any tool, indexed by any script, moved into any repo. Notes that live in a vendor's database survive only as long as your plan and their export do. Granola is a well-established and well-funded competitor and it is genuinely good, but its free tier caps MCP access at personal notes from the last 30 days and gates the transcript, search and folder tools behind a paid plan. Ours is on the free tier over the full local history. That is a checkable difference about terms and ownership, not a claim that we are better software.
- Granola's own documentation
- Gates transcript, search and folder MCP tools behind a paid plan, and caps free MCP access at personal notes from the last 30 days.
- Stack Overflow Developer Survey 2025
- Professional developers: Windows 49.5%, macOS 32.9%, Ubuntu 27.7%. Relevant because a Mac-only tool reaches a minority of any engineering team.
How it fits a founder week
A block of customer interviews
Six calls on a Wednesday, back to back, on three different platforms. Start recording from the menu bar each time. Nothing joins the call, so a prospect meeting you for the first time is not looking at a bot in the participant list while you build rapport.
The synthesis you were going to do on Friday
Open Claude or Cursor, point it at the MCP server, and ask what the last twenty calls said about pricing. It reads your own transcripts on disk. This is the step that usually gets skipped, and it is what turns thirty calls into a decision.
Writing the investor update
Ask across the quarter instead of scrolling your calendar. What did we tell the board we would ship, what did we actually ship, what did customers say about it. The answer comes from the files, with dates attached.
Paste the decision into the spec
Notes are markdown, so the relevant passage drops straight into a PRD, a Linear issue or a repo doc. Pro adds Obsidian sync if that is where your product wiki already lives.
The honest limits before you download it
- We want the whole team to see the same notes. Does it do that?
- No. There is no shared team library, no admin console, no seat management and no way for one person to search another person's meetings. Notes live on the Mac of whoever recorded the call, and sharing one means sending a file. If your requirement is a searchable archive the whole team reaches, this does not meet it and you should buy something that does.
- Our engineers are on Linux and Windows.
- Then they cannot run it. Stack Overflow's 2025 developer survey put professional developers at 49.5% Windows, 32.9% macOS and 27.7% Ubuntu, so a Mac-only tool covers part of most engineering teams at best. It runs on macOS on a Mac with Apple Silicon, and Intel Macs are not supported either.
- We already use Granola and like it.
- Then there is no urgency to move. Granola is a strong product with the same bot-free approach and it is well ahead of us on polish and on team features. The specific reason to look at this instead is if you want the MCP access to your full history on the free tier, or you want the notes to be markdown files on your own disk rather than records inside a service. If neither of those is a real constraint for you, stay.
- Can I get an admin view of what the team is recording?
- No, and nothing in the product is heading that way. There is no central visibility of any kind. That is a deliberate architectural consequence of everything being local, and for a company that wants oversight it is a reason not to buy it.
- Our team is not all English speakers.
- The app interface is English. The on-device model transcribes other languages, but the menus, settings and the app itself are English only, and if that is a problem for part of your team it is better known now than after the download.
- Is anything about our roadmap leaving the building?
- Not in local mode. Recording and transcription happen on the Mac and audio never leaves the device on any tier. If you switch on Pro hosted models for summaries or fast cross-meeting chat, the transcript text is sent to that service, and audio still is not. That is a switch you control.
Against the tools founders and PMs actually shortlist
| Ghosty Notes | Alternatives | |
|---|---|---|
| Bot-free recording | Same. Recording comes from your Mac system audio | Fathom, Otter, Notion AI and Granola all capture without a bot joining the call now |
| Where the audio goes | Nowhere. Recording and transcription both stay on your Mac, on every tier | To vendor servers for all four, bot or no bot, and that is where speech becomes text |
| MCP access to your history | MCP server on the free tier, over your full local history | Granola caps free MCP at personal notes from the last 30 days and gates transcript, search and folder tools behind a paid plan |
| What the notes are | Markdown files in a folder you choose | Records inside the vendor product, retrieved by export |
| Shared team library and admin | No. Notes stay on the recorder's own machine | Yes, on team plans |
| Platforms | macOS on a Mac with Apple Silicon only | Otter, Fathom and Notion AI cover Windows and the browser |
| Cost per person | Free tier, or Pro at $5.00 a month or $54.00 a year | Per seat, and the useful tier is usually the paid one |
Questions from founders and product managers
- What gets sent anywhere if I turn on Pro hosted models?
- The transcript text only. Audio never leaves your Mac on any tier. Hosted models are what power Pro summaries and fast cross-meeting chat, and if you keep everything local nothing is sent at all. Cloud calendar sync with Google or Outlook is Pro too, and that sends calendar event details, not meeting content.
- What hardware do I need?
- A Mac with Apple Silicon. Intel Macs are not supported, because the speech model runs on the Apple Silicon hardware rather than on a server. Any Apple Silicon Mac works.
- How does the MCP server actually help me?
- It gives an AI app you already use, Claude, ChatGPT or Cursor, a way to read your local meeting notes. You ask a question in that app and it answers from your transcripts. It is on the free tier and it covers your whole local history, not a recent window.
- Can I ask across thirty customer calls at once?
- Yes, that is the main reason to keep full transcripts rather than summaries. The answer quality depends on the model you point at it, and the notes themselves are just text files, so any tool that can read a folder can also do it.
- Does it record in-person meetings and phone calls?
- It records what your Mac hears and plays, so a dial-in on speaker or a room conversation with the laptop open both work, as does any video platform. Zoom, Meet and Teams are the same job to it.
- Who said what in a five-person product review?
- Speaker identification is a Pro feature and runs locally like everything else. On the free tier you get the transcript with no speaker labels, which on a five-way call is a genuine limitation.
- Can I share a note with a co-founder?
- By sending the file. There is no shared library and no sync between two people's copies of the app, so the note you send is a copy, not a shared record that updates.
- What happens to my notes if I stop paying?
- Nothing. They are markdown files already on your disk. Dropping from Pro to free removes hosted models, cloud calendar sync, speaker identification and Obsidian sync, and touches nothing you have already recorded.
Record your next customer interview
Free tier: on-device transcription, unlimited meetings, the MCP server over your full local history, and local Apple Calendar detection. Pro is $5.00 a month or $54.00 a year.
Download free for Mac