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Show HN: Teamates.io – Random video chats for professionals

9 points by Aglartur ↗ HN
Hello HN,

I built Teamates.io[0] - a place for professionals to have small coffee chats with a random partner right now. Think of it like a virtual coffeeshop where you can chat with strangers while you're taking a little break.

It's in open beta and you can try using it right now. Please be nice and professional to each other :)

I noticed over the course of pandemic I missed random coffee chats with my coworkers and random chats with strangers. I think it's important to have these unplanned conversations.

I would really appreciate the feedback from you all, since I believe it's a pretty important problem to solve. Feel free to leave a HN comment or fill out a survey at the end of your call.

Thanks, Aibek

[0] https://www.teamates.io

6 comments

[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 23.7 ms ] thread
Jugurtha
>(don't worry there is a waiting room to prepare)

I really like this sentence.

A few ramblings before trying this:

Kind of Omegle but safe for work ?

LinkedIn and GitHub as Login options. Gives information about users.

I just tried it. There are 0 people. I clicked Ready to Chat and it said that it's looking for matches.

If I click the Back button, then it'll increment the number of users online.

If I click ready to chat then the back button again, it will increment the number of users as many times as I do this.

Aglartur
Thanks for checking it out! Glad you liked that little note about the waiting room, I wanted to give users an expectation of what happens after clicking the button.

> Kind of Omegle but safe for work?

Exactly, I wanted to provide an experience of bumping into somebody in an office/cafe while getting coffee or taking a break. Current products that do that, like Omegle and Chatroulette have a high percentage of NSFW interactions.

> LinkedIn and GitHub as Login options. Gives information about users.

I plan on doing that, as well as login with your company email. However for this open beta, I wanted to reduce friction and have it available for all, with "pre-vetted" community, like HN.

>I just tried it. There are 0 people. I clicked Ready to Chat and it said that it's looking for matches.

Unfortunately I learned, Teamates.io is very similar to an online game, if there are no users online at the same time, it doesn't provide value. I'm actually thinking about launching it at my day job(I built Teamates.io on my free time), to promote it to a set of people and confine to some hour range to increase concentration of people online.

Also thanks for the bug report, I need to add a "logout" call, when navigating away from the waiting room via react router

Jugurtha
Maybe add a hint on what time most people have been on the site, or show a distribution of number of people vs. time.

Bonus if there's an option to change time zone.

Right now, it is 0357 where I am (UTC+1). I'm not sure who visits your site the most, and what time zone they are in.

Aglartur
That's a good idea, thanks! I think it will communicate the "busy hours" really well.