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Launch HN: PingPong (YC W21) – Video messaging for remote teams

news.ycombinator.com

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Re: Launch HN: PingPong (YC W21) – Video messaging for remote teams

#31

Post by dang »

lvass wrote: post #26
dang wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

" Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something. " https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I'm sorry if I sounded dismissive, I was just impressed by the way the text sounded to Me, as I read it, and figured people might be interested in the data that I collected as I thought made said text sound weird to Me. I have no idea why My comments would not be considered a good critical comment to you the same way I think it looks like to Me. Get My point? (I never meant to be shallowly dismissive but rather provi…

I don't really get your point, but it may be relevant that when I edit launch texts for YC startups [1], I tell founders not to refer to themselves by company name. As in: don't say "FooCo lets you bar your baz"—that's a trope of marketing language. Put it some other way, such as "We let you bar your baz". Perhaps that advice is pushing things too far towards "we"? I don't know; I didn't notice it yet, but there must be some reason it triggered an adverse reaction.

[1] and non-YC startups! anyone is welcome to ask for help with this at hn@ycombinator.com, as long as you remember that the worst-case latency for response times may be astonishingly terrible. You can see the advice we give to YC startups here: https://news.ycombinator.com/yli.html. The logistical bits don't apply to non-YC cos, but the communication bits emphatically do.

Re: Launch HN: PingPong (YC W21) – Video messaging for remote teams

#32

Post by abbyeyre »

Could be an interesting proposition for classroom use—some of my students juggle babysitting while they are in my class and their grades suffer. State require synchronous instruction time, leaving an inequitable gap for students whose parents work during the day. Will you provide premium access to educators?

Re: Launch HN: PingPong (YC W21) – Video messaging for remote teams

#33

Post by jeffwhitlock »

abbyeyre wrote: post #32

Could be an interesting proposition for classroom use—some of my students juggle babysitting while they are in my class and their grades suffer. State require synchronous instruction time, leaving an inequitable gap for students whose parents work during the day. Will you provide premium access to educators?

Great question. We're focused on helping remote product teams, but I'd be happy to give premium access to educators—if they think it will help!

Re: Launch HN: PingPong (YC W21) – Video messaging for remote teams

#34

Post by ryleyrandall22 »

I’ve been on a few teams that used to use slack and loom to achieve a similar effect. One benefit of loom though was the ability to have our internal communication and demos to customers in the same space. Any plans to offer sending a video to someone not in your workspace?

Re: Launch HN: PingPong (YC W21) – Video messaging for remote teams

#35

Post by jeffwhitlock »

ngould wrote: post #29

> We hope to ultimately build a Slack/Teams alternative designed for rich, asynchronous human interactions that encourage deep work. All I can say is keep going. I've been feeling the absence of this for a while, and have taken to making occasional videos on Loom to supplement live meetings and Slack messages. But it's a disjointed experience, and Loom is not trying to be a collaboration tool at all. It would be grea…

Thanks for the encouragement and article on Figma.

> By the way, I downloaded the PingPong app, and it seems great. Are you selling subscriptions, or just putting the free version out there for now?

No paid subscription for now; we're optimizing for usage and feedback. We should always have a free plan and introduce new features into a paid tier in the long run.

Re: Launch HN: PingPong (YC W21) – Video messaging for remote teams

#36

Post by jeffwhitlock »

ryleyrandall22 wrote: post #34

I’ve been on a few teams that used to use slack and loom to achieve a similar effect. One benefit of loom though was the ability to have our internal communication and demos to customers in the same space. Any plans to offer sending a video to someone not in your workspace?

Currently, you can copy links and view the videos on the web. You can't organize the videos in folders like Loom, though. Our goal is to facilitate a far more seamless back-and-forth collaboration.

Re: Launch HN: PingPong (YC W21) – Video messaging for remote teams

#37

Post by jeffwhitlock »

flaque wrote: post #16

This is clever; it’s pulling a common behavior (audio messages on whatsapp) and pulling it into work culture. Slack followed this strategy pretty well.

Exactly. Many people prefer text messaging to phone calls because it’s faster and integrates with the rest of your life.

Slack brought SMS to the workplace.

Consumers use Snapchat, WhatsApp, and Marco Polo for video/voice recording, but no one has cracked this for collaboration in work cultures.

Re: Launch HN: PingPong (YC W21) – Video messaging for remote teams

#38

Post by lvass »

dang wrote: post #31
lvass wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sorry if I sounded dismissive, I was just impressed by the way the text sounded to Me, as I read it, and figured people might be interested in the data that I collected as I thought made said text sound weird to Me. I have no idea why My comments would not be considered a good critical comment to you the same way I think it looks like to Me. Get My point? (I never meant to be shallowly dismissive but rather provi…

I don't really get your point, but it may be relevant that when I edit launch texts for YC startups [1], I tell founders not to refer to themselves by company name. As in: don't say "FooCo lets you bar your baz"—that's a trope of marketing language. Put it some other way, such as "We let you bar your baz". Perhaps that advice is pushing things too far towards "we"? I don't know; I didn't notice it yet, but there must…

Substituting "we" for the company name would probably not help at all. The text simply is too personal. This is particularly bad for a company whose goal is likely to provide value with absolute minimal friction—the potential user is primarily looking for something to improve their lives and wants to know what can be done for them. I urge you to highlight all the occurrences of "we" in the text and see how many phrases are meaningful in that regard, and for the ones that are, how most can be simplified by being rewritten as impersonal.

I see Dale Carnegie getting a lot of flak these days but this is one point he illustrates incredibly well in his most famous book in my opinion.

Re: Launch HN: PingPong (YC W21) – Video messaging for remote teams

#39

Post by mikejarema »

alexandargyurov wrote: post #27

Why have I seen 2 other companies doing the same thing just in the past week? https://www.verbz.ai/ ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26265024 ) https://www.woice.me/ ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26340042 )

Helpful (http://helpful.com) was working on this as well but got acquired (or maybe acquihired?) by Shopify. I'm not sure how much traction they got or if the product was just before its time. I suspect there are a bunch of lessons to learn from their efforts.
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