Feedback Wanted: A Free Chat Community for Your Website With One Line of Code
We originally launched Relay as a browser extension that adds chat to every website. It received a lot of attention (#1 on Product Hunt), but we decided that the product wasn't viable in that form for a number of reasons. We've since pivoted to offering per-page chat for free with just a script tag. It comes with all the features and more you'd expect from a modern chat application, including reactions, threads, mentions, moderation tools powered by artificial intelligence, and even push notifications. It's like a portable Discord where your users won't ever have to leave your website.
We'd love to get your feedback on the product before we share it more broadly. Is this something you could see yourself adding to your site? Which vertical would you go after? Is this a product that makes you excited, and if not, what's it missing?
Sam, this looks pretty interesting actually.
In fact, I was just discussing this very subject with @melonhead related to the launch of his Laylo SaaS.
He's working out a couple email bugs I reported still, but I'm looking to find a medium where I can direct existing waitlist people to, grow more of a waitlist, and have the ability for the community to interact with me and each other.
Seems like like Laylo + Relay would be one option
or
[Some landing page with opt-in] + Relay
If Alec from Laylo can work out the email issues I reported, I'd love to test out the combination of Laylo + Relay
Otherwise, I may have to put up a landing page + opt-in on my domain, and run/test Relay there.
Any chance you and Alec can connect to see if Laylo + Relay can happen?
@melonhead @relay - happy to make the connection. Seems like a natural fit.
Thanks for looping me in Mike! Love this combo concept
Wow, what perfect timing! This seems like a perfect use case for Relay. I'll email @melonhead and see if we can work on a collab :). And thank you for the kind words.
Can you email me (see my IH profile)?
I've got a couple other use-cases to bounce off you. Maybe we can jump on a quick Zoom too.
Just emailed you!
Love the new direction! What distribution channels are you going to lean into with this different approach?
We have a large email list, a Twitter following of about 14k, and we can relaunch on Product Hunt. I expect the major driver of acquisition to be end users of the chat adding Relay to their own sites, which will reach more end users, and so on.
Are you thinking this is like: https://disqus.com ?
Would this be geared to particular demographic or type of sites ?
Interesting idea! Just wondering isn't facebook offers the same thing as well? Adding a script tag and a messenger button that is connected to your facebook page will appear on your website. Can I know what's the main differentiator?
Thanks for checking it out! The main differentiator is that Relay is many-to-many chat whereas FB messenger, intercom, etc. are one-to-many. Relay’s more like a Discord or Slack community directly in your website.
Seriously cool, let me try this right away and see how it goes.
But yeah, a simple video on your website would help visualize things in a jiffy. Just a suggestion :)
That's a great idea. Do you recommend any promo video producers?
Some screenshots with it in action would be helpful to visualize this. I like the idea though, just trying to picture in my head how it would work.
Or, duh, just use the chat that is in place on your website. 🙈
Thinking about it, the biggest barrier for me to use it is signing up to an account.
As a user: do I want to sign up to another thing?
As a website owner: where are the users details being stored? Is there any way I get access, or insight into it?
That's a great point. We're planning to offer Relay as an OAuth provider if there's enough interest, so you could ask your users to authenticate with Relay and receive all of their message data and (eventually) profile information. Would that be something you'd be interested in? As far as reducing the signup friction, would our consuming OAuth applications like Google and Facebook help?
@relay I'd trim down the WS data field names a little too for some easy optimization on data, especially since they're so repetitive!
We’ll be sure to look into that. Thank you :)
Checked it out, it's a pretty sweet implementation!
Thanks for checking it out!
I will surely use it in my website. Can i configure it to use same chat room for all pages? and an option for changing color theme will be better.
Thank you, that’s awesome! There’s currently one page for each pathname, but we plan to add the ability to call the chat whatever you want within the next week or so. As far as theming, we expect to roll that out in about a month :)
@gilbish we knocked out both of these features today!
You can override the chat channel's location like this: https://relaychat.app/docs.html#overriding-the-chat-channel-39-s-location
So, for example, if you wanted every chatroom to be yoursite.com, you'd add the script tag <script src="https://chat.relaychat.app?path="></script>. No matter the path of the current page, they'd get that same chatroom.
And you can now set the background color of the Relay button in the admin interface. We're still working on further customizability.
Thanks again for the feedback.
That's great, thanks for the features :)
This is good, i really liked the idea.
Thank you!