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Screen sharing in Slack, made interactive via Screenhero acquisition (YC W13)

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Re: Screen sharing in Slack, made interactive via Screenhero acquisition (YC W13)

#121

Post by kjksf »

zpr wrote: post #114
kjksf wrote: post #112

People are so desperate to find viable business ideas. We discuss to death MVPs, fake landing pages, articles describing how to find and validate ideas and find first customers. Yet, no one notices when business opportunity stares them in the face. Go and duplicate screenhero. It's not that hard (Screenhero was written by 4 devs and 1 designer). They did YC in winter 2013 and got acquired by Slack in Jan 20015, so it…

You mean you could make a YouTube clone in a weekend? It's easy to fall into this way of thinking. But hey, maybe you will build the next Screenhero, or TeamViewer. Or maybe you'll end up as one of the thousands of other versions of this nobody has ever heard of. The idea is usually not the hard part.

I mean that you can make a Screenhero clone in approximately the same amount of time that it took to write it originally. Should be a bit less because straight path (cloning) is shorter than twisty one (things that Screenhero did that did not end up in the final product).

Note that by the time of Slack acquisition Screenhero was approaching v2.0, they had product out far longer than that. So it's not unreasonable to say you could do a v1 of similar product in a year.

Both idea and execution are hard. Cloning existing idea removes one hard part, therefore increasing the chances of success. Look at Excel, Word or Baidu or Sina Weibo.

As to "thousands of other versions of this": you would have to point to at least one. It's hard to argue against imaginary products.

Based on this thread for many people Screenhero has no acceptable substitute.

Re: Screen sharing in Slack, made interactive via Screenhero acquisition (YC W13)

#122

Post by kjksf »

tlogan wrote: post #120
kjksf wrote: post #112

People are so desperate to find viable business ideas. We discuss to death MVPs, fake landing pages, articles describing how to find and validate ideas and find first customers. Yet, no one notices when business opportunity stares them in the face. Go and duplicate screenhero. It's not that hard (Screenhero was written by 4 devs and 1 designer). They did YC in winter 2013 and got acquired by Slack in Jan 20015, so it…

Sadly this is not true. There are so many excellent applications and SaaS - but they die very fast. If the company which builds an excellent solution does not get acquired they will learn the meaning of the word "hell on earth": customer acquisition baby. Customer acquisition is not easy. Of course, customer acquisition is easier if your product does not suck - but not so much.

Screenhero clearly has customers. See all the people on this thread that are sad that Screenhero is going away. You could get your first 10 customers just by contacting those people.

I'm not disputing that customer acquisition is hard but that's exactly why cloning Screenhero is better than doing any random idea.

Also, you would have to list a couple of those "excellent applications that die very fast" before I just take your word for it. Personally I see many not so great applications that do decent business and have never seen an excellent application that died.

Re: Screen sharing in Slack, made interactive via Screenhero acquisition (YC W13)

#123

Post by tclancy »

eltoozero wrote: post #102
skrowl wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you tried Discord? It's geared towards gamers but it's got most of the features we needed from Slack. More info: https://support.discordapp.com/hc/en-us/articles/11500098275...

Due to shenanigans toward Jason Scott[0], and the whole "Hype Squad" thing I have zero interest in supporting Discord. [0]: https://twitter.com/i/web/status/903663357210841088?lang=en

Good God, being old is going to be rough for our generation. That makes me want to burn down the sender's house.

Re: Screen sharing in Slack, made interactive via Screenhero acquisition (YC W13)

#124

Post by lwhsiao »

jsherwani wrote: post #15
giovannibajo1 wrote: post #5

When is videocalling and screensharing coming to Linux?

Linux already has video calls and screen sharing! Just no shared control / drawing.

That shared control and having both mouse pointers visible was really the key value of Screenhero for me. I would love to see something that does this on Linux.

Re: Screen sharing in Slack, made interactive via Screenhero acquisition (YC W13)

#125

Post by pentae »

philwelch wrote: post #119
eltoozero wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except they actually have IRC and XMPP gateways available if you're RAM constrained or are a console cowboy type.[0] [0]: https://get.slack.help/hc/en-us/articles/201727913-Connect-t...

Why not use run an open-source IRC server then?

How would you use a poo emoji then?

Re: Screen sharing in Slack, made interactive via Screenhero acquisition (YC W13)

#126

Post by wlesieutre »

jlehuraux wrote: post #60
tarikjn wrote: post #29

I wish this was forked instead of killed. Everytime I use Screenhero, it has been butter smooth. I would be ready to pay $3/month for screenhero standalone or a pay-per-use. I'm not interested in Slack, the use cases are clearly different. I think Slack missed or rather killed an opportunity here, they could have kept Screenhero (and use it to upsell Slack) and also integrated it in Slack. Not only that but it took t…

Have you tried USE Together? Collaborative screen sharing with multiple mouse cursors and simple web browser access. Currently in free beta, we are working hard on Mac support, coming really soon :) http://www.use-together.com

I'd hate to jump on board a replacement only to have MS buy it for a crappy Skype integration. I see it's a free beta now, any word on the monetization plan?

Re: Screen sharing in Slack, made interactive via Screenhero acquisition (YC W13)

#127

Post by gcheong »

kjksf wrote: post #112

People are so desperate to find viable business ideas. We discuss to death MVPs, fake landing pages, articles describing how to find and validate ideas and find first customers. Yet, no one notices when business opportunity stares them in the face. Go and duplicate screenhero. It's not that hard (Screenhero was written by 4 devs and 1 designer). They did YC in winter 2013 and got acquired by Slack in Jan 20015, so it…

Yet Screenhero had been at it for 4 years at least, presumably had ongoing guidance from and access to the great business minds at YC and yet in the end decided that the best value they could get for their product was as a feature of Slack.

Re: Screen sharing in Slack, made interactive via Screenhero acquisition (YC W13)

#128

Post by rsoto »

I'm going to mention Jitsi Meet[1] since nobody has mentioned it. 6 months or so ago I started looking for a simple, reliable and cheap option to share a screen. I don't like GoToMeeting because it's too enterprise-y and there are a lot of steps involved—not too friendly for my tastes. And there are a few like that.

I stumbled upon Screenhero, but it was already too late—Slack bought it and it's not possible to create a new account.

What we chose for a few weeks was Appear.in—a simple, painless and reliable tool. However I feel like it's not polished enough, and some of our clients had issues with it, so I kept looking.

Jitsi has been a blast: just install an extension (or no extension if you're on Firefox) and you're ready to go. It's uncluttered, it's reliable and too good to be free to be honest.

Only downside it's that all the URLs are public and since there are no registration involved, there's no admin on each channel.

1: https://meet.jit.si/

Re: Screen sharing in Slack, made interactive via Screenhero acquisition (YC W13)

#129

Post by yeswecatan »

kjksf wrote: post #112

People are so desperate to find viable business ideas. We discuss to death MVPs, fake landing pages, articles describing how to find and validate ideas and find first customers. Yet, no one notices when business opportunity stares them in the face. Go and duplicate screenhero. It's not that hard (Screenhero was written by 4 devs and 1 designer). They did YC in winter 2013 and got acquired by Slack in Jan 20015, so it…

I'm sure it's not that simple. If there were an open source version I'd love to contribute.

Re: Screen sharing in Slack, made interactive via Screenhero acquisition (YC W13)

#130

Post by sogen »

kjksf wrote: post #112

People are so desperate to find viable business ideas. We discuss to death MVPs, fake landing pages, articles describing how to find and validate ideas and find first customers. Yet, no one notices when business opportunity stares them in the face. Go and duplicate screenhero. It's not that hard (Screenhero was written by 4 devs and 1 designer). They did YC in winter 2013 and got acquired by Slack in Jan 20015, so it…

Previous discussion, with at least 20 alternatives:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13620626

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