Protocall: a side project that wouldn't stay small

We're a small remote dev team — one of a few thousand out there quietly building software for other people's businesses. What probably makes us a little different: we get just as excited about building things for ourselves as we do about client work.

Five years ago, more or less by accident...

one of us was fed up with something in the messenger our team used daily. Instead of just venting about it in the group chat (the irony isn't lost on us), someone else said, "why don't we just build our own?" No pitch deck, no roadmap — just two people annoyed at the same problem on the same day.

What started as an afternoon's frustration is now the thing we all open first thing every morning.

A couple of reasons it stuck around:

• We own it, top to bottom — turns out that alone changes how much you care about something

• We're stingy with features on purpose. Small team, zero tolerance for red tape, so the rule has always been: if none of us reaches for it during a real workday, it doesn't make the cut

The messy middle

Somewhere between 2023 and 2025, we rewrote the whole thing three times. Not because we had to — because there's no deadline when you're building something for yourself, so we kept starting over until it actually felt right. Somewhere in there we also added a built-in wallet, mostly so we could split the kebab bill without leaving the chat. Priorities, you know.

Why we're finally showing this to you

We've shared Protocall with colleagues, friends, family, and clients over the years — and at some point we started noticing the same reaction over and over: "wait, why isn't this a real thing yet?"

So here we are. Right now we've got around 20 people actively testing it with us day to day, and we'd love to get that number higher.

Protocall is a messenger built for small remote teams — the ones who move fast and hate switching between five apps just to get one thing done. It already has one thing we haven't seen anywhere else: video calls built directly into group chats. No "let's hop on a call" in some other app — you're already there.

There's still plenty to build. And honestly, we can't figure out what's actually worth building next without more people using it and telling us what's wrong with it.

P.S. We do have a roadmap — we're just more interested in hearing what you'd change about it than in sticking to it blindly.

Join our Rewards Program
We've set up a program to reward people for testing Protocall, reporting bugs, and throwing ideas at us:

👉 https://community.protocall.ch/ 💙