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Building a walkie-talkie for remote work

pragli.com

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Re: Building a walkie-talkie for remote work

#21

Post by tommoor »

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!

Re: Building a walkie-talkie for remote work

#23

Post by peteretep »

dstaley wrote: post #16

As a remote worker (and as someone who prefers remote work) I feel like this is attempting to recreate the feeling of stopping by someone's desk in an office. If that's what you want to recreate, I think this is an interesting approach, but I've always felt that remote workers do so specifically because they prefer not having in-office distractions. (Assuming those working remotely prefer to do so of course. I realiz…

> I've always felt that remote workers do so specifically because they prefer not having in-office distractions

Some, probably, but I miss that specific aspect about being in an office. I like that I can temperature and sound control my office, and be somewhere super sunny and cheap when the office is gloomy and expensive. I quite like this idea.

Re: Building a walkie-talkie for remote work

#25

Post by dsaffy »

LeonB wrote: post #13

I have a friend who uses an always on audio for his entirely remote team and swears by it. I think it might depend on personality types. I’m willing to admit it does work for some teams even if my own initial reaction is “no way!”

Making it very customizable is key. Different teams have different workflows.

Re: Building a walkie-talkie for remote work

#26

Post by TenXProgrammer »

fortran77 wrote: post #10

We have a lot of fun with this walkie-talkie https://cb.virtualairwaves.com/channel/1 WebRTC Push to talk. It "just works" in most desktop browsers. No login, no registration. You can make private channels and there's several public ones. There's an iOS and Android client, too. We really like the "push to talk" model. You can leave the client up and quickly say something to everyone else in your group. Especially goo…

Agreed. I like Walkie Talkies -- both real ones, and virtual ones. Push-To-Talk is a great way to communicate, and deserves to come back! It was very popular in the 70s, and remains useful among "hams" and people who work on movie sets, construction sites, etc.

Re: Building a walkie-talkie for remote work

#27

Post by dsaffy »

tommoor wrote: post #21

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 re…

Thanks for sharing your experience Tom! I DM'd you on Twitter, would love to learn more.

Re: Building a walkie-talkie for remote work

#29

Post by dsaffy »

mr_justin wrote: post #22

I love the idea of taking well understood analog concepts and applying them to the digital remote workplace, but man, forced sync calls coming in on a whim without my control to ignore them sounds like my absolute worst nightmare.

If you haven't already, take a look at the section "Solving Distraction: Presence + Statuses + Calendar" in the article - I dive into our attempt to solve this problem.

Do you think our solution is insufficient? If so, any ideas on how we could further solve it?

Re: Building a walkie-talkie for remote work

#30

Post by donpark »

While I don't think Walkie-Talkie metaphor works for remote teams in general due to becoming an open invite to interruption, it may work for teams that need to work in tight collaboration, like in rapid emergency response and battle management even when everyone is in the same building.
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