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Show HN: OnAir – create link, receive calls

onair.io

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Re: Show HN: OnAir – create link, receive calls

#101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're a business, nothing beats "let's just hop on a call". For me at least, the first one that picks up my call is the one who gets my money. "Send us an email, here's our WhatsApp, ..." kind of thing, I don't even try.

I think more generally nothing beats being able to communicate with a customer in the way the customer prefers. If that's email, that's what you do. If it's a phone call, that's what you do. But I think as time goes on the number of people preferring a phone call will continue to decline. Time will tell I guess.

For customer/client communications, absolutely.

Internally however, once I figure out someone is haphazard with meeting time and meanders around in meetings getting precious little if any action done, I take proactive measures.

When they request a meeting, I ask for the agenda and the outcomes they want to take out of the meeting. Most of the time, everything is hashed out in advance in async channels and the meeting is either highly abbreviated from the original invitation or cancelled altogether because it turns out, the rest of the invited attendees also weren't crisp on what the meeting organizer wanted.

The number of people who call for a meeting simply because they haven't organized their thoughts, asked the right people the right questions, and are simply waiting around for someone to tell them what the correct next step is...is thankfully not an alarming number, but nonetheless simply a personally idiosyncratic annoyance to me.

Re: Show HN: OnAir – create link, receive calls

#102

Dang! I was about to share this service with my CS and Sales colleagues, but stopped myself when I realized they won’t touch it unless it can be integrated with services like Gong and Salesforce, for call tracking, transcriptions, trainings and archives. I know you have some of these native, but getting a group of people to move to a new app yet again is harder to do than bringing your service to their existing envir…

Hi - very curious. Is your current PBX integrated with Gong/Salesforce? What if something like OnAir could be another channel for inbound calls?

Re: Show HN: OnAir – create link, receive calls

#103
post #50

Had launched something like this in 2016. We had called it as ering.me, so you could have an url like ering.me/handle. Used it in email signatures, web calling etc. It didn't pick up at that time or we didn't market enough :) Hope the market is mature now and products like this succeed. All the best.

I'm not really surprised. The people who grew up with phone calls and who like to "hop on a call" to work out issues are all aging out. They are in their fifties at the youngest, if not already retired. It's my experience that far fewer younger people reach for the phone as a first means of contact. It's not preferred, and they try to avoid it. And by "call" I mean direct, synchronous, real-time conversation. Whether…

Many of the SaaS/PaaS Show HN's here fail to get our business because they have team or business plans behind a Call Us (especially silly for metered usage). We want our team to use SaaS/PaaS before tackling it themselves, and the team will if the barrier to "already using it" goes down.

Talking to B2B SaaS here:

If your service adds value to small to midsize firms, and we can sign up without calling and still get (a) team features, and (b) sign-in with Apple/Microsoft with a domain match (and/or SAML SSO, but that's hassle), you almost automatically have us as a paying client. (Sign in with GitHub and Google don't count if you are trying to get IdP using clients outside the tech bubble.)

We do not want to "Call Us". Likely those who could talk with you and make the decision cost more per hour than your service costs per year per user. Costs you money too, and the friction costs you more in missed opportunities.

We don't want to book meetings. We are building, not sitting on Zoom calls to hear "sales engineers" unable to answer basic tech or security questions we can answer ourselves once we have access to docs or better just use it.

You let individuals sign up. Firms are just individuals roaming in packs.

Let individuals sign up their packs too.

Re: Show HN: OnAir – create link, receive calls

#104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am in my mid-30s and am definitely a “let’s just hop on a call” guy. So much quicker, easier, and less chance for miscommunication IME.

If you're a business, nothing beats "let's just hop on a call". For me at least, the first one that picks up my call is the one who gets my money. "Send us an email, here's our WhatsApp, ..." kind of thing, I don't even try.

The one that doesn't need a call gets our money.

Re: Show HN: OnAir – create link, receive calls

#105

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 t…

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.

Re: Show HN: OnAir – create link, receive calls

#106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your idea seems to build on what people often do with virtual, credit card numbers. They use different numbers for different businesses. If they get ripped off, they can narrow down which business was used for that. On top of that, different points of contact might also have different, response policies. Like your existing customers vs targeted leads vs random people. You’d really want to know which were calling you.

Precisely. I'd love that same level of virtualization but for calls.

Just saw your other thread (but can't respond on it). We offer a similar service, no need to share your number. Add a call now button to the website, user clicks on it and you can take the call on your laptop/cell phone/PBX/browser. If not, call goes to VM (and you are sent an email with the message).

Re: Show HN: OnAir – create link, receive calls

#107
post #50

Had launched something like this in 2016. We had called it as ering.me, so you could have an url like ering.me/handle. Used it in email signatures, web calling etc. It didn't pick up at that time or we didn't market enough :) Hope the market is mature now and products like this succeed. All the best.

I'm not really surprised. The people who grew up with phone calls and who like to "hop on a call" to work out issues are all aging out. They are in their fifties at the youngest, if not already retired. It's my experience that far fewer younger people reach for the phone as a first means of contact. It's not preferred, and they try to avoid it. And by "call" I mean direct, synchronous, real-time conversation. Whether…

> The people who grew up with phone calls and who like to "hop on a call" to work out issues are all aging out. They are in their fifties at the youngest, if not already retired. It's my experience that far fewer younger people reach for the phone as a first means of contact. It's not preferred, and they try to avoid it.

That is not at all my experience, and I'd correlate it more to junior/seniority than age directly. I think perhaps more junior there's a temptation to screen-share (screenshots over pasted code/errors too) to show how confusing something is, where with experience you're more comfortable asking a question(s) in text and understanding & applying the answer(s).

Re: Show HN: OnAir – create link, receive calls

#108
post #12
post #6

Someone please explain to me why a phone call is different to this, I'm truly blanking.

I dig this. This is what I am thinking. Much easier to click than dial. Social cost of a web link versus a phone number may be lower as well (that may be cultural but it may be true) Adds other modes like calendar or chat or AI directly in flow. No need to reveal a phone number. Video Internationally accessible (no long distance) And for HN tradition’s sake for these types of comments, no one likes rsync.

> Much easier to click than dial.

I've been dialing from a click for 20 years now.

https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc3966

Re: Show HN: OnAir – create link, receive calls

#109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not really surprised. The people who grew up with phone calls and who like to "hop on a call" to work out issues are all aging out. They are in their fifties at the youngest, if not already retired. It's my experience that far fewer younger people reach for the phone as a first means of contact. It's not preferred, and they try to avoid it. And by "call" I mean direct, synchronous, real-time conversation. Whether…

The nice thing about real time calls is they help avoid confusion, convey more emotion and information than most messages can. There is less ambiguity usually during a real conversation. Conversations tend to resolve very quickly because in the span of five minutes we can go back and forth on multiple questions, get clarity and finalize how we want continue. Some things require this but not everything. There is a bal…

Laughing at this because last time I tried to arrange a call to get my detailed questions answered it was immediately obvious that the person I worked with had NONE of the answers and I was wasting my time.

I wasn’t even convinced there was a working product after that.

So it goes both ways.

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