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263 points bigmicro | 3 comments | | HN request time: 0.626s | source

Hello HN community,

This is bootstrapped/indie hacker-ish. Would appreciate feedback.

What it is: You create a link (e.g. onair/yourname), and anyone can call you from it. Caller uses a web browser to make the call (not dedicated app). You can create as many links as you want, and can direct calls to colleagues in a round-robin or escalation manner.

In a way, it's like the "opposite of Calendly"; whereas Calendly is about meetings in the future, OnAir is about immediate meetings.

Motivation behind it: One of our SaaS products was struggling to grow. We believed that if we provide more "hand holding" to visitors on the landing page, it will increase conversion. It's like speaking to the guy behind the counter before making a purchase. That idea/experiment, over time, became OnAir.

Feedback: Identifying the perfect use case / customer has not been easy. E-Commerce store owners, which I thought would be ideal customer profile, are not responding as expected (e.g. "why use this instead of a WhatsApp button?"). The value of branded links, round-robin, recording/transcription, lead capture, etc does not seem to matter much to them. Ideas are welcome.

1. pqdbr ◴[] No.42146758[source]
Congrats on launching!

Curious how the dynamic image works in the e-mail signature: AFAIK, Gmail and others heavily cache any images inside e-mail, so even if the image changes, Gmail will be displaying the online/offline cached image, not the most up-to-date one.

replies(1): >>42146807 #
2. bigmicro ◴[] No.42146807[source]
You can overcome this using headers, which instructs Gmail not to cache. Snippet:

response.headers["Cache-Control"] = "no-cache, no-store, max-age=0, must-revalidate"

response.headers["Pragma"] = "no-cache"

response.headers["Expires"] = "Fri, 01 Jan 1990 00:00:00 GMT"

replies(1): >>42147611 #
3. floobertoober ◴[] No.42147611[source]
You might want to investigate this further - IIRC a lot of email services retrieve images in advance server side to avoid leaking whether the client has interacted with the email. I might be mistaken here.