Launch HN: Sidekick (YC S20) – A hardware device to connect remote teams
I'm Andy, one of the founders at Sidekick (https://sidekick.video/). Sidekick is a new hardware device built to connect remote teams with an always-on video call.
Sidekick sits on your desk next to your computer — with Sidekick you just turn to your teammates and talk, as if you're in the same room.
Like many of you all, we were recently forced to start working remotely because of COVID. After fleeing NYC to return to our childhood homes, we quickly realized that starting a company while remote was brutal. We were missing out on all the spontaneous conversations and camaraderie that occur when we're in the same room. We knew we needed to simulate being in the same room to build our company.
Initially we built Sidekick just for ourselves, but many of the founders in our YC batch wanted to try it out! We realized that our founding team wasn't an anomaly for wanting an always-on video device — we pivoted from our previous idea to start working on Sidekick to help the other founders in our batch.
Sidekick works best with fast-paced teams that need to be constantly communicating — founders are a great example. We're working with 25 YC founding teams along with experimental product teams at Store No. 8 and Brex. That being said, Sidekick isn't for everyone! If you don't really want to talk to your team during the day, Sidekick probably isn't a great fit.
We talked to many teams that tried to hack together a solution with Zoom on an iPad. From the teams we spoke to, we learned that it's really hard to consistently get the team in the room at the same time. Users are constantly leaving the room for other meetings but for everyone still in the room, it seems like nobody wants to use it because it's empty. This causes a negative feedback loop where even more people leave the room and the hacked together solution quickly becomes useless.
Sidekick is built to maximize the chances that you're not in the room alone. Unlike other jerry-rigged solutions, it treats "always-on" as a first-class problem to solve. Some examples of product decisions we've made are:
- Push notifications to minimize being alone in the room - when someone joins as the first person in the room, we send a notification to the rest of the team. We want to get other teammates in the room ASAP because the room is only useful with more than one person.
- Meeting mode - when you have a normal Zoom meeting with someone outside of your team, you can mark yourself as "in a meeting". This silences the mic and speakers on Sidekick while also setting a status informing your team that you're in a meeting, but you'll be back soon if someone needs you. We're also releasing Google Calendar integration soon, allowing Sidekick to automatically mark itself as "in a meeting"
On average our users are in their Sidekick rooms for 6 hours a day. They turn it on first thing when they sit down in the morning and leave it on throughout all their meetings during the day.
Our customers pay for Sidekick with a subscription model and we have a special promotion until Aug 1st for $25/user/month. The hardware comes for free and we handle all the shipping. We went with this model because we want our customers to pay us for the experience, not the hardware. We didn't want customers to have to think about whether they wanted to buy a pricy new device when the real question should be whether they want to try the experience.
We believe that working in the same room is part of the secret sauce to building an awesome company. We want all teams to be able to have access to that experience.
I really love this community and I'm excited to share Sidekick with all of you. We'd love to hear your feedback, particularly if you're working on a team that misses being in the same room. Feel free to ask any questions — I'll be around to answer anything...
233 comments
[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 246 ms ] threadThis is an interesting problem. How to recreate a “frosted glass” that’s introvert friendly (there’s a disorder that affects X% of the population where they can’t work if they’re being watched...the name escapes me) while reducing the friction of adhoc interactions (time, clicks, etc).
Hopefully there’s some interesting solutions soon.
One thing this solution perhaps doesn’t address is portability. Sure you can take the device with you, but will you? So it’s a “home office” solution not a “remote as in Starbucks” (if that ever exists again) solution.
Neat idea!
Regarding portability, we were actually pleasantly surprised to learn that a lot of our users took Sidekick with them when they found different homes to shelter in place. We're thinking about adding some software companion apps to help with this as well.
edit: yes it's always-on, but you have the capability to turn it off easily with one button click.
So your "new hardware device" is a Samsung Galaxy Tab A 10.1 (2019) with a stand, isn't it?
What's your motivation to offer hardware instead of selling the Android app separately as well, so customers could use it without the hassle of getting hardware shipped?
We also handle all shipping/return costs -- we're trying to minimize any burden on the customers.
How many free tablets can I get for $25/mo? What do you do when you realize someone has spilled coffee on 3 tablets, and now their credit card isn't rebilling and they aren't responding to email?
Hopefully not, though, I truly like the product.
https://reincubate.com/camo/
It’s yearly subscription software but doing the app route you mentioned. Grabbed a little iPhone camera mount clip for like 10 bucks and it’s really something.
Maybe it’s not a problem unless someone breaks in to your home/office, but at the very least a passcode might be nice if you lock it for x amount of minutes. It’s often a requirement for regulatory compliance as well (although if a company has to have an airtight setup I don’t know if they’d be the target market).
(If you have this feature, then that’s swell! It looks very cool, even if it reminds me a bit of the telescreen from 1984...)
I think it has to do with the medium. Maybe the answer involves coming up with some sort experience that doesn't feel as dry and disconnected as video conferencing. This is where the idea of course becomes hand wavy -- but maybe it involves some use of AR, or a projector -- who knows.
If I were in your shoes I'd be thinking about a game-changer, instead of an incremental enhancement of video conferencing. Maybe that's bad advice, but I know I don't find this offering terribly compelling.
From interviews, our theory is that it's because most of the time, the Hangouts all day solution decays because people have too many experiences being alone in the room.
Again still really early, so we're also figuring it out but thanks for the data point!
Good luck :). I'll stay dialed in and genuinely hope y'all knock it out of the park so I can reconnect with my colleagues!
That makes the experience a little uncomfortable as an always-on thing.
I'd definitely like to know that resource use was minimal when I wasn't in a conversation or actively engaged with the system.
I think that having the system as an appliance is a plus and makes it more comfortable to just leave on - versus something running in a window on a screen from my work laptop.
This isn't a super new thing, though. There have been a number of companies in the past 5-10 years that offered similar functionality without the hook of having a separate device (Sqwiggle, pukkateam, sneek, etc).
I had only tried Pragli and it is underwhelming. Too much cpu usage even after they removed snapshots of you. The Spotify integration is te one nice feature none of the others have.
Thanks for the names of apps. Going to try the latter two.
By "knee-jerk" I didn't mean new, but meant that it lacked depth. Hopefully my elaboration clarified that I think the company is on the right track, just that they need to go a bit further and extend beyond what traditional video conferencing already (kind of) offers.
They're doing that, and they're a startup -- so I know they're starting lean and that they'll learn, change and add bells and whistles as time goes. This is the right way to do things :).
Thanks for your clarification and overall I agree with your original issue.
I have a small but growing community of people from before corona with the center piece being a 24/7 Zoom meeting room and yeah it has never felt fully right. It still works out, but it does feel as if there’s something off.
Sidekick is built to be always-on so teammates can feel like they're in the same room. Many teams we spoke to have tried doing it with Zoom or Jitsi, but they all decay because it's really hard to get people in the room, at the same time. Sidekick's features try to maximize the chances that you're not in the room alone.
This is a standalone device which takes care of a major part of the headache in transitioning to remote work -- a second monitor and webcam, a whiteboarding device, and a "who's online for me to talk to" visibility feature.
It's like paying $25 to bring the social experience of an office to your remote work environment without worrying about technical details or availability issues.
"Someone has their camera on? Cool, I can ping them, no worries."
The only feature I'd like to see is a "camera off but still pingable" mode, but honestly, I'd probably put a piece of tape over the camera and it'd work just fine.
The idea makes sense though, and it's something we'll definitely think about.
That's called Facetime'ing someone.
IBM released a very popular set of working from home guidelines - one of the absolute most important rules is that you never ask an employee to turn on their cameras - it's an invasion of privacy.
i think that's called a slack message, or maybe email.
My understanding is that camera on = talk to me at any time. And maybe some users would still like that openness, without worrying if someone is watching them pick their nose.
A Slack message would start with "Hey, can we connect at some point..."
We think we can solve for the impromptu conversations with a specified custom status that folks can trigger when open to a conversation (Eg. Water cooler, coffee break, etc).
Would love any feedback!
All those things come with an ipad or a second monitor and you have a lot more control.
HWe use an RTC room on existing PC, with an alert and PTT mode. so we have always on listen-audio. Its like a web-based walkie-talkie (remember Nextel?) It's rigged to our Mattermost too
Ours cost like $500 to build - this would cost us over $500 every two months at discount price.
And how many teammates do you have? It seems like 10?
7 core staff, 3-5 contractors and we let our clients in too. Most solutions breakdown for us because of our loose definition of "user"
Lately, I've had a laptop in my office's cube with Skype and VNC set up so I can connect any time I want and leave myself virtually present for hours at a time. I like it. I'm sure that a dedicated product could offer more features and efficiencies than I have with my jury-rigged setup.
Best of luck to you.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borland_Sidekick
Why would anyone WANT to be on an always on video chat?
If an employer ever sent me one of these, they would get it back (with my resignation) immediately.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
We understand that Sidekick isn't for everyone and that's totally cool! We built it for those teams that work best while they're in the same room. These teams actually want to be on camera so they can turn and talk as if they're sitting side by side. Founders are a great example.
We use the standard WebRTC model where 1:1 Sidekicks are peer-to-peer (video streams sent directly to other clients), and 3+ Sidekicks go through SFUs that we host on AWS. These SFUs deployed all around in the world (in every major AWS region), and we assign Sidekicks to the SFU nearest to everyone on their team.
Internally the metric we aim for is to keep the end-to-end latency under 200ms.
Sidekick's features maximize the chances you're not alone. Some examples are outlined in the original post!
The teams that use Sidekick want to feel like they're in the same room with an always-on video -- it's actually the most effective way to get their jobs done.
Like others i’m not convinced that the answer is another screen or if it’s some other kind of in between semi passive experience.
Once it disappears it’s interesting to consider what specific qualities of just turn and talk to someone is absent in remote work and how you could bridge some of those feelings with some kind of digital experience. A projector? A robot? VR? AR?
Remote work had made me more finely attuned to how many physical non verbal cues you exchange with office mates on a daily basis and how exhausting it can feel to duplicate those digitally.
From our early users, the screen is awesome - it's the closest thing that exists to sitting in the same room.
The idea of another way to simulate "semi-passive experience" is really interesting. We'll definitely keep it in mind!
2 Questions:
- Can I still share my screen?
- Your "How it Works" section says $50/user/month but your "Get the Band Back Together" section says $25/user/month. Then the titlebar says "$25/user/month until august 1st". So.... is it $25/user/month in July and then goes up?
- Regarding pricing, it's $25/user/month if you sign up before August 1st and that price is locked in for life. (The $50 is a mistake, and we're changing it right now)
How ever, unlike the parent comment I wish you would succeed and you will account for the visceral hatred from a lot of us to build a lot of privacy features into your product and not get tempted to turn this product into virtual peeping tom for micro managers.
I think looking for a product to solve this may not be the most efficient way to help the mental state. In fact, reaching out to more people into the company is easier than ever now, just a message away.
We built Sidekick to maximize the chances that you're not alone in the room. I talk more about some of the features in the original post!