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263 points bigmicro | 3 comments | | HN request time: 0.001s | 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. qntmfred ◴[] No.42151331[source]
i've been playing around with a similar concept over the last year as well

when i'm at my PC, I keep a google meet on all day. instead of slacking me, coworkers can go to my google meet link (which never changes cus it's a recurring event on my calendar) and talk to me immediately. far better than huddles because there's no "are you available for a huddle" friction. if i'm online, then i'm online and the permission to just come talk to me is implicit.

I also use it for family and friends. my wife, kids, sister and parents can always just go to my meet link if they want to pop in to chat. i've shared it with friends and former coworkers too.

additionally, every day I start a private youtube livestream (and sometimes public) and embed the stream on my website at kenwarner.com/online which is linked with a :large_green_cirle: in the header menu so people can quickly see that i'm online. when people find my website (usually from twitter interactions) sometimes people will join the meet to talk too. much more chill than most (text-based) interactions on twitter. even if the conversation started (on twitter) with some kind of disagreement, people act like human beings again (for the most part) when it's a video chat. it's fun.

i've often thought that it'd be neat if there were a service similar to calendly.com/username like you've done to let people talk/videochat any time. if enough people had such a thing, you could build a social media platform on top of it too. the digital public square today is still mostly text (twitter/threads/bluesky/etc) and the image/video platforms (ig/tiktok/youtube) are all still oriented around a one to many broadcast model. i'm a creator and you're an audience member. with monetization of the audience in mind. omegle was a sort of person to person videochat platform, but it was all random connections. this would be more directed in terms of who you decide to talk to.

hadn't thought of this idea as just targeted at business use cases, but it makes sense. hope y'all get some traction!

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2. gsuuon ◴[] No.42156935[source]
I really like this idea and have (briefly) tried something similar with a 'personal' discord server. I think this sort of thing would be great to rebuild local community over the internet instead of mostly faceless or parasocial interaction.
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3. qntmfred ◴[] No.42157974[source]
i also have a personal discord server, but discord is stuck being a text-first platform built for gamers around small/medium-sized communities.

I want to see a video-first/text-second platform emerge that serves as a global public square to supplant twitter. tiktok/reels/shorts is close, but it's too algorithm driven, too creator/audience for monetization dynamic driven, too vod-oriented vs live-oriented, and too walled-garden.