Launch HN: Rally.Video (YC S20) – Dynamic video platform for social groups
My name is Ali and I am one of the three co-founders of https://rally.video/. Rally is a video application that makes it easy to hop between breakout conversations. Users can see and hear other conversations around them, as if they were in a shared space.
We started Rally because we needed to host a virtual birthday party, and existing solutions suck for larger groups. At the same time, we noticed bars and restaurants closing, and wanted to build a platform that emulated these physical spaces. With that in mind, we added venues, rooms, and tables. A venue (like a bar or banquet hall) can consist of multiple rooms (like a patio, DJ lounge etc). Each room can fit 35 people, and people can form tables (groups) in a room organically. Tables could have up to 9 people, and can be joined with a simple click. Users can create multiple rooms, allowing for events of all sizes, and we are working quickly to expand the capacity of each room.
What’s magical about this is how much more it feels like a real party, as opposed to feeling like a meeting. Instead of being stuck in a giant gallery view or siloed into breakout rooms, you are free to switch between tables and rooms as you like. Instead of everyone being on mute, you can choose to vibe off of the audible laughter and chatter from neighbouring tables in the room. You can also create private tables for more personal conversations and take the stage to present to everyone around you.
Since launching, people have used our platform for happy hours, team socials, hackathons, brainstorming sessions, conference networking, trade shows, virtual parties, and community gatherings. We know a lot of people are using Zoom breakout rooms for these types of events. Those work fine for board meetings, training, structured workshops and interviews. We think our platform is more valuable when you want less structure and a more social element. Simply put, if you want spontaneity, our platform works. If you want formal structure, use the other tools.
Rally is a web app, with video being streamed using WebRTC - so no plugin installation is required. It works best on Desktop Chrome. We are also working on a mobile version - coming soon.
I am really excited to share our startup with the Hacker News community. I have tried and failed at building a number of companies, and reading a lot of the content here has helped recharge my batteries and helped me keep going.
We are free for anyone to use until the end of August. We are still testing out different use cases and seeing where demand for our product is the strongest. I recognize the space is competitive, and would appreciate your feedback on our product. We’d be grateful if you tried it out for yourself, or joined us for one of our happy hours today or this week. We’d be super grateful if you’d be willing to try it out with a group of 6 or more people, maybe with your work team, and letting us know what you think!
Start your own room by visiting https://rally.video
Attend a happy hour by signing up here: https://www.eventbrite.ca/e/happy-hour-at-rally-bar-tickets-...
89 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 176 ms ] threadI have yet to see any remote technology that comes anywhere close to representing that golden sense of audience.
for the last two bigger events we had a live-stream with the audience watching (together) on the big screen
Rally was the first one that felt natural, to leave and join a table, and for there to be a natural speaker "on stage".
Next it would be cool to see if we would hold these calls persistently so we can capture some of the serendipity of hearing conversations one table over when in person.
Kudos to the Rally team!
Spatial.chat and my own Calla.chat provide a completely different interaction metaphor. The room is solitary, but all audio in that room is spatialized. Spatial.chat does volume scaling, Calla.chat does full spatialization, including support for HFRT.
We're trying to take it the direction of conferences/tech events with https://meetfromhome.io/.
In fact, I find it allows for more serendipity than a lot of in-person events. In person, once you're sitting down at a table it's socially awkward to get up and move to another table. Mostly you just talk with whoever you're sitting next to or across from. With Rally it's much more fluid. I find myself hopping around all the time.
In our internal meeting this week we split into groups of 3, and then took turns jumping on stage to report back to the group.
Disclaimer: we invested
That said, I'm a little concerned about the business model. What's preventing the popular (and sometimes free) platforms such as https://whereby.com or https://team.video from adding these features?
Exciting! Can't wait to see how your product evolves.
Am I far off in thinking that the core challenge would be replicating the transition between sub-groups? That moment where you'd like to move on from a conversation and can gracefully step away without interrupting a conversation to announce your exit, walk through the room until you hear something interesting, sidle on up to another conversation without it feeling obtrusive, then join in.
I wonder if the abrupt nature of popping into someone's conversation with a new video-chat window would go against this. Either way, seems like an interesting puzzle to solve. Plus, the market is big, has a ton of attention right now, and any product has some inherent virality built in since some number of attendees will try it again afterwards. Very cool.
I think that was rather uncalled for. My own use of avatars was a result of a lot of specific design decisions, around dissatisfaction with webcam video, i.e. the incongruity between the theoretical reason for why it's there ("to provide eye-contact!") and the reality that it fails at that task.
Good luck with your project.
If anyone manages to actually crack that, either by simulation or some other method, they'll monumentally change telework.
This product looks very cool, it's a step in that direction.
Similarly in a remote coworking community I started in 2019, we have also settled on a culture of not worrying about “politeness” when it comes to coming and going. It is so much better.
Of course like you say, to have all of this work for people across the board is a much harder feat.
For bigger events, there is an elevator, that takes you flying from room to room: https://twitter.com/NeeshStudio/status/1286010155772108802
I'm thinking about something like https://kastapp.co where people can do stuff together. It's easier to hang out with other people if there is something to do.
I am also a big believer in the watch party space. Shared online experiences are an undiscovered opportunity in the consumer space. Happy to share more thoughts on this as well!
https://kosmi.io/ is pretty good at co-play and screenshare.
And there's the much simpler https://www.comeover.io/ built on WebTorrent (comes with all the limitations that entails wrt file sizes).
https://rally.video is something drastically different to those, but could very well implement the missing features, I reckon: it'd be über cool to host a virtual School, let alone host a movie night.
Room discovery is definitely in the works. We thought about a public bar platform at one point. IE imagine going to a Japanese bar with your friends online and hanging out with them. It feels like an interesting consumer use case.
Minimum time is not something we thought of. That is interesting. Definitely some food for thought.
We're from Toronto and not only are we Drake fans but 'The Drake" is a popular bar in the city that used us a few times to host trivia and happy hours. I was very confused at first when I saw your username haha!
Have you considered or tried playing background music to get more of a bar atmosphere?
Main desire: ability to name tables.
In running workshops, sometimes each table will have a theme and then people who want to talk about that theme can join the table. Would make it easier for people to know what is being discussed at a table before joining. One facilitation example is the World Cafe method [1].
Any way to do this now as a host or plans to include it?
[1]: https://therightquestions.co/the-world-cafe-workshop-facilit...
However, I think having the ability to take the stage and speak to all participants can help to reduce that, by requesting people to try to mix it up a bit, sit with someone new.
Also, I think the dynamics would be different based on who gets to name the tables. If just the host of the room, then maybe more control. If table hosts can name their table, maybe it has a higher likelihood of people sticking with people like them.
Even if it does lead to tribal grouping, sometimes that's not a bad thing. For example, if I'm running a session where I want people to reflect deeply about some topic, sometimes it's nice to have the built-in trust that comes from being of the same group.
I could talk about this stuff for days :-)
In other words, the pitch on your site doesn't sound like a place I'd go as a normal person to have a party with some friends. It sounds like a service a company pays for to host branded events.
Targeting everyone seems like the explosive growth trajectory where as targeting businesses does not, at least to me. If some venue uses this they'd advertise themselves, not you?
I get that I'm clueless about this topic so I'm not claiming to be right. Just curious. I get that business customers pay but the YC way seems to be growth first?
We started by telling bars this could be a way to talk to your customers during COVID but they wouldn't budge. We then saw business uptake first and thought, this is what we should do, so we decided to go down this route.
Through YC we have been exploring different use cases and thus kept the platform open for anyone to try. I think what we realized is the money is in large conferences and remote teams. There will always be a free tier for consumers and smaller communities, but b2b or b2b2c seems to be the direction to take this.
I'd love to hear more ideas from you but definitely agree a fully open funnel isn't right.