Meet Cam
Adds useful widgets to your camera video on the call.
We've launched on Product Hunt. Just barely - I wanted to take a break from the code for a second and it was on my list. I must have signed up there more than 5 years ago... probably for the first and last time.
Sounds like Product Hunt is a big deal nowadays, but since we did not think people who read it are among our core group, we weren't thinking about it too seriously. Yet is still was nagging me on my to-do list, so I thought that if I can make it in an hour, then I'm doing that. As an MVP. As a prototype. As let's-just-get-it-off-my-damn-list.
After 6 days, we have 252 upvotes and were featured as 9th product of the day with being as high as 3rd place.
Next time I am giving myself 15 minutes tops and hope for better results! ;-)
We've added three new decoration sets to help folks celebrate the New Year. People can add Golden Baloons, Baubles, Presents and "2021" in Golden.
We are also constantly releasing new versions, namely - we've noticed that many people automatically skip our video tutorial which is important, because it involves some manual work: choosing the camera in Zoom / Google Meet and understanding that Meet Cam is only visible in the menu bar.
We've improved the onboarding and added more tracking around it to help build conversion funnels as well as understand where the bottlenecks might be.
We have finally released the first public version of Meet Cam!
We've updated the site, so that our perspective users don't sign up for waiting list any more, but after leaving their e-mail, they receive install link and personal activation code immediately.
Our initial release contains first 3 "useful" features...
- Countdown
- Meeting Timer
- Headline
...and 3 "fun" features for XMAS:
- Animated Reindeers
- Snow
- XMAS decorations
We have also updated the site with new XMAS related features... and added snow there too!
After figuring out that our Demo-related product is currently no-go, we looked at which features we've shown people were most valuable to them, and it seemed like there were two categories.
Productivity - with COVID19 around us and remote work for everyone, many people feel like the time wasted on too many too long meetings is even more painfull when WFH.
So we see this as our theme - how to improve people's productivity on the calls. Facilitating such meetings, workshops and teaching on-line falls in and around it. Think TimeTimer and Sticky Notes, but integrated online into the call. Without having to download anything. Without having to explain how to do it. Without the troubleshooting.
Fun - as social creatures, we want to express ourselves, impress others and play team games (conscious or not). In real life, we have lots of opportunities to do it, but that's not the case when we're on the next-closest level to being around one another: on a video call. Plus, it's cool to react non-verbally when we don't want to interrupt.
So we dug deeper, started Figma, designed our BA* set of features, LS* UI and things like that, recorded screencasts (thanks, ScreenFlow!), designed and built a website (Gatsby + Tailwind + Firebase), launched it (yarn deploy), and started collecting e-mails...
- BA - Barely Acceptable.
- LS - Laughably Simple.
Our initial idea that we've pushed to a functional prototype phase that we could actually use on the calls did not have as much to do with meetings, as it had with demos.
Think: you would buy seats from us for your sales reps, to be able to provide an amazing presentations with bells and whistles, that would blow your prospective customer away, they would sign up for the pro-expert-premium-enterprise plan and you would reap the LTV happily ever after.
So we've prepared a prototype and had a bunch of customer development sessions with, who we thought, was a perfect example of our target group. The prototype was actually usable and we could AMAZE everyone in real-time with things like embedded webviews, notes, gifs (throough giphy integration), emojis and god only knows what.
Ultimately, we've decided that selling to sales teams is not exactly the type of battle we want to fight and that screen sharing wasn't that bad as it was after all...
...but the whole timers-gifs-emojis-and-effects-on-the-screen-next-to-your-face is still interesting on many levels. And it's fun!
We have started talking about how the time is right for both of us personally to bootstrap something new and what that might be.
After considering a couple of options, that leverage our respective skillsets and interests, we have started exploring rough product ideas around improving communication for people and teams over video calls by building on top of what currently exists as a commodity.
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