Chinwag
Chinwag brings remote teams together with co-op games
People (myself included) are bored of video calls. It's hard to keep a "social" conversation going ... the small talk eventually runs out. This is even more the case when operating remotely - there's little external stimulus to capture your attention. In addition the fact that only one person can speak at a time is very annoying.
So - here's a wild idea. Let's give people something to talk about.
I love co-op games. So why not build one for others to play?
Well this is pretty exciting! Chinwag is the #2 product of the week on Remote Tools! Who knew a virtual watercooler would be so popular :)
Curiously the download stats showing on Chrome Web Store haven't bumped by much. Currently at 6 installs. I suspect the stats might be lagging a bit.
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I did some research on remote.tools and they don't seem to have a rank on SimilarWeb/alexa. Are you sure they'd bring you traffic at all? I'd focus on bigger sites, like Betalist/ProductHunt if I was you.
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I have no idea how much traffic it'll bring in, but it was a lovely surprise :) They do have a newsletter with 4k people and a 40% open rate, so part of the the benefit of ranking is being a part of their newsletter.
From friends that have ranked on PH, there's a big splash and lots of traffic yes. But, unless you've already had time (and traffic) to tune the funnel and the value proposition the traffic won't convert very well.
Given Chinwag's target market, Remote Tools makes more sense for me right now. I'd prefer to build out the product for small groups initially and iterate until those small groups absolutely love it. Once that's done PH, etc. will be the natural next step.
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Building the plugin has been quite fun. I had to learn a couple of new technologies and deal with some cross-browser-compatibility annoyances. Now that it's built I've started to wonder how I'll get the word to spread beyond my team. I've had a read of the IndieHackers "start here" stuff and it seems blogging (as a form of content marketing) is pretty important.
Fortunately I've just discovered eleventy and put together a personal blog. I'll just use that as the foundation of the Chinwag blog. Perhaps the phrase should be "blog it and they will come...eventually"?
Okay. WebRTC is hard. I put together an MVP of the idea and it worked fine... usually. The problem is that I'm a bit cheap, so I didn't want to set up an expensive (in terms of bandwidth usage) TURN server. That meant I could only rely on the Peer connections - which only work around 80% of the time. This is roughly okay, except that I'm targeting the workplace... and in workplace environments WebRTC doesn't really work without TURN because corporate firewalls aggressively filter traffic.
Instead, I'm moving to a browser plugin. That will facilitate the connection (i.e. let you know when someone wants a Chinwag) and connect you via Google Meet. We can still do the maximum of 3 participants thing, but there are a few features we can't easily do. But at least the video-calling infrastructure is taken care of so I can focus on building an awesome user experience.
As ever more people start to wfh it's clear that a sense of loneliness and isolation is setting in for some people in my team. I've had an idea - a video call platform that is purpose-built for small conversations.
The problem with the usual video-call suspects (Zoom, Google Meet, Teams, etc.) is that quite a few people can be part of a conversation. That means it's hard to get a word in edgeways. Also, calls need to be formally arranged - you can't just drop in and out... unless you leave a meet open all day which hogs computing resources needlessly.
Solution will have the following key features:
- You can't see yourself in the conversation (just like real life)
- 3 people per conversation max
- Switch off WebRTC connections that hog resources when not in use
- MVP will just be an always-open browser tab - when people open the tab we'll see if anyone is around to connect to
- If someone moves away from the tab we'll switch off the conversation (no multitasking IRL watercooler chats)
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