I have worked remotely for 10 years and raised VC funding for an idea very similar to this in the past – we failed to build a sustainable business, although the product did have a couple of hundred teams that swore by the product.
In hindsight I believe it's because we were following the startup mythology of "building a solution for the problem that you have" a little too closely. We failed to realize that this is really a problem that only small startup teams (usually a group of founders) have, as they need to keep in constant sync. It doesn't really scale past that. As soon as you have any sort of mixture of roles, personalities, or start to grow the team this is a communication method that just inherently doesn't scale well.
I do believe there is something here for small groups of founders/friends though, good luck!
Oh, you built Sqwiggle! A couple of friends and I used to work together remotely and we used it every day. It was awesome -- just the right balance between being unobtrusive yet easy to have a quick discussion when needed. We loved it so much, we even made a (much less-polished) clone after you shut down so we could continue with the same workflow.
I think many to one eventually becomes the real challenge. IOW how to get the message to the lowest ranking person able to deal with the issue depending on its content.
I think it's still fine. My experience with many-to-many conversation is that there is always someone whose computer is configured in such a way that it causes everyone's speech to echo and makes it difficult to understand. With a walkie-talkie approach, you bypass this problem entirely.
I think probably the commenter's startup failed because of competition from big hyped, well funded players like Slack. Maybe when the hype settles, they would have a chance. Timing is everything.
Only a handful of lucky few who are well connected don't have to worry about competitors, everyone else needs to assume a competitive landscape full of noise and misinformation.
I’m not sure that’s true regarding it being limited to small startups and founders.
I manage a team of over a dozen people at a large tech company with a few of them remote, and a pretty flexible work from home policy. We find that our standups can run long because it’s such an easy opportunity to chat face to face with remote people, but really you want a couple of conversations and doing them one at a time is kinda slow. It’d be nice to be able to just have a super quick multi party conversation without having to do a call. We’re even considering Mumble or Ventrilo.
I used Sqwiggle back in 2013 and while I appreciated the idea in theory, as an employee, it felt like an employee oversight tool.
Essentially, it gave the impression that my boss didn't trust that I was doing my work. This tool made it so someone could see if I was actually at the computer doing work.
It also drained my battery, so I always needed to have my computer plugged-in.
We used Sqwiggle back in the day until a picture of the naked wife of one of our coworkers got captured and stood there for over 5 minutes. That was the last day we used it.
To add to that, it is also a problem that new remote teams have. When working with others who have been remote for years, we simply have learned how to use async communication for almost everything, and we just start up a slack call when we need to share a screen.
On the other hand, new remote teams are still trying to continue their habits from being in an office, so they want constant, easy communication. To me, this product sustains unwise habits more than it solves a problem.
But to each their own -- all teams are different, as are communications styles. I'm not going to say that products like this are bad ideas... just that the market is more narrow that people might believe.
We used Squiggle for a little while and really really wanted it to work for us. But the audio and video quality (and connection reliability) was just not nearly as good as FaceTime, and we were/are a two-man team, so we just switched back to FaceTime. I actually think Squiggle 2.0 but with the reliability and audo/video quality of FaceTime would be a different proposition. Audio feedback, background noise, broken connections, and laggy fuzzy video all make the experience suck. Details matter.
Indeed, AV is _hard_ – just look at how much people continue to complain about Google Hangouts despite all the resources they have. Quality of connection beats everything else which is probably why Zoom made it to IPO despite terrible UX
In hindsight I believe it's because we were following the startup mythology of "building a solution for the problem that you have" a little too closely. We failed to realize that this is really a problem that only small startup teams (usually a group of founders) have, as they need to keep in constant sync. It doesn't really scale past that. As soon as you have any sort of mixture of roles, personalities, or start to grow the team this is a communication method that just inherently doesn't scale well.
I do believe there is something here for small groups of founders/friends though, good luck!