Show HN: OnAir – create link, receive calls (onair.io)
This is bootstrapped/indie hacker-ish. Would appreciate feedback.
What it is: You create a link (e.g. onair/yourname), and anyone can call you from it. Caller uses a web browser to make the call (not dedicated app). You can create as many links as you want, and can direct calls to colleagues in a round-robin or escalation manner.
In a way, it's like the "opposite of Calendly"; whereas Calendly is about meetings in the future, OnAir is about immediate meetings.
Motivation behind it: One of our SaaS products was struggling to grow. We believed that if we provide more "hand holding" to visitors on the landing page, it will increase conversion. It's like speaking to the guy behind the counter before making a purchase. That idea/experiment, over time, became OnAir.
Feedback: Identifying the perfect use case / customer has not been easy. E-Commerce store owners, which I thought would be ideal customer profile, are not responding as expected (e.g. "why use this instead of a WhatsApp button?"). The value of branded links, round-robin, recording/transcription, lead capture, etc does not seem to matter much to them. Ideas are welcome.
112 comments
[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 183 ms ] threadSoo, if you’re like me, booking a call is a necessity. Most days, half of my day is booked. How do you work around this?
That said, I do like the idea of a uniformed platform with a low barrier of entry when it comes to contacting me.
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.
In what way is this easier than click to dial? They’re both one click, but in this scenario I need a headset/microphone, a stable Internet connection, and if I do this from my smart phone it doesn’t know I’m in a call so when I hold the phone up to my face I will likely hit buttons.
I've been dialing from a click for 20 years now.
https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc3966
- assign calls to different members (round-robin, escalation)
- capture lead info (name, email, etc)
- don't reveal actual phone number
- recording, transcription
- soon, conversational AI agent (as optional backup)
With a WhatsApp/phone, you can't really switch it from one employee to another easily. Managing load is harder, seeing call logs is harder. And a full call center solution is too much for a small business.
Curious how the dynamic image works in the e-mail signature: AFAIK, Gmail and others heavily cache any images inside e-mail, so even if the image changes, Gmail will be displaying the online/offline cached image, not the most up-to-date one.
response.headers["Cache-Control"] = "no-cache, no-store, max-age=0, must-revalidate"
response.headers["Pragma"] = "no-cache"
response.headers["Expires"] = "Fri, 01 Jan 1990 00:00:00 GMT"
Twilio, voice app etc. But I was so lazy to do a proper marketing and sales.
However I had some ideas that I can share with you if you want:) For free ofc!
Wish you all the luck! Contrast with nice product! Super good!
At the top of the pricing page you show that it's $9 a month to have 10 links and enable round-robin call handling, but looking at the FAQs at the bottom, it's actually $9 a month PER USER:
> OnAir costs as low as $9/user/month. This price is per user, per month. Other pricing plans are displayed on this page. Higher enterprise plans are available starting at $250/month for up to 50 users.
This means that for $9, you actually do NOT get round-robin, since you'd need to pay at least $18 (2 users) to benefit from it.
Similarly the 10 links make it seem like you can have links to reach 10 people, but once again this would in fact cost $90 a month.
If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html and https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it.
Example: in most cases, I don't have a microphone or headset on my office desktop PC (don't need it, we don't do zooms), have very slow internet access on my smartphone (forget OnAir calling with it, and anyway it would be too much friction to reopen the same web page on it just to call), but have a very well working landline phone nearby.
One possibility you might think about is to get a VoIP number terminated at your server (and possibly a free 1-800-xxxx but those don't necessarily work from abroad), where people can call, enter a code displayed by the OnAir client in the web page (like an extension ID, but it might be random if there's a value in obliging people to come to the web page before calling, e.g. to limit spam calling), and once done they'd be connected as if they were calling through the web page. The limitation with this solution here is that you'd need a number for each country you want to support, as international calls easily get expensive, especially from mobile.
https://ozonetel.com/ind/
If theres a way around that, and at min. Leveraging gong for the recording and transcription, do let us know. Nice service! I’ll personally use it in places like email and linked in to try it out.
I also don’t want to make a call from my web browser, I’m off on a device without a microphone and headset connected, and if I’m on my smart phone the actual phone capabilities are a lot better in a phone call (I can mute, switch to speakerphone/bt, and hold the phone up to my ear without pressing any buttons on screen).
What about audience engagement for streamers? my first thought when I saw this was oldschool public access "phone in" shows.
of course, a different usecase demands a different featureset (like, delay, moderation, OBS integration...
Hope the market is mature now and products like this succeed. All the best.
And by "call" I mean direct, synchronous, real-time conversation. Whether literally a phone call, or an online voice or video call.
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 balance as with everything.
> nearly half [of gen z] admit that speaking on the phone makes them feel anxious (49 per cent)
> an awkward phone call is one of the top three things they would most want to avoid (42 per cent)
That being said I'm quite confident there is enough of a market that doesn't dread talking on the phone that this company could do very well for itself and its founders financial goals.
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https://www.commbank.com.au/articles/newsroom/2023/06/CBA-Mo...
I prefer in writing, because I always hope that when it eventually gets to a human, they can read the whole conversation and save a lot of time. Using voice, almost always, I have to repeat the information to each person as we go, and it's tiresome.
When I was young we had a landline at home and yes there were some telemarketing calls but they were not the majority. Most calls were from friends or family or legitimate other purposes. That's not how it is today, at least in my experience.
Part of it is that anything other than a local call used to cost money. So there was a financial disincentive to robo-call thousands of people hoping that you'd find one rube.
The problem runs the other direction as well. Friends in the US tell me that the local hospital no longer permits direct calls to rooms, on account of both robocalls and spams. It's now necessary to call through the operator.
This is a (slight) inconvenience to friends and family, and a considerable workload and staffing burden for the hospital.
I've been predicting the death of telephony, as in a universal direct-contact, single-directory (as in: everyone has an identifier which can be reached by any other party regardless of provider) for about a decade now. It's a death-by-a-thousand-cuts phenomenon, but increasingly it's difficult or impossible to reach specific individuals or organisations by phone. The issue isn't just landlines (used by a minority of households in many states, though some such as New York are apparently still above 50%, contrast < 20% throughout much of the central US), but all public switch telephone networks.
Expect a fragmentation to various online services (FB, WhatsApp, Google, Skype, Zoom), home-rolled networks, and those who just opt out fully.
Strangely, it seems like the world is becoming more like me over time. I tend to think of my preferred communication style as strange and awkward because that's what a lifetime of experience has taught me but the new generation seems to also prefer it.
Often we end up convinced we are on the same page when we aren't just because our communication is constrained (and accelerated) by social protocol. At least when it is written out you can go back and re-read or directly quote someone. In meetings I find myself constantly pointing out when someone has been fundamentally misunderstood in a way that aligns with the listener's existing beliefs/preferences, "oh, I think what Frank is saying might actually be the opposite of [your interpretation]?".
There are pros and cons to different forms of communication. Sometimes a call can help cut through layers of misunderstanding, but for more complex topics, often it's difficult to get a group of people to all be present enough to share genuine understanding. School is a great example of how ineffective this can be.
I wasn’t even convinced there was a working product after that.
So it goes both ways.
So much quicker, easier, and less chance for miscommunication IME.
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.
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.
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.
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).
Appear.in (now called https://whereby.com/) used to have the same functionality and I would just share my link everywhere so that team members could call me whenever they wanted.
Although, Facetime is kind of the exact same thing isn’t it?
OK, I do have a Mac Mini for development purposes, but I don't want to have to drag it out of storage just to make a call.
(I’m an Apple reader of HN and I didn’t know this either!)
Should probably consider moving to Elixir, if that's not what you're using on the server already.
I can't think of anything. One could argue that Ruby might have a larger package repo to pull in dependencies from, but this being a telecom adjacent domain you'll find that Elixir and OTP solves some tricky problems rather well that mainly object oriented languages tend to struggle with.
You'd also get out of having to skip between your application language and Golang down in Livekit, since the Membrane folks have built a standalone WebRTC platform: https://github.com/elixir-webrtc
In production Ruby code bases also tends to degrade over time. The team will sometimes find itself under duress and push magic tricks that Ruby allows to prod. Perhaps it's a matter of taste or whatever, but I've found most of the Rails applications I've come across somewhat hard to learn and debug. Similar to annotation driven applications in Java things can get really weird and brittle. These things are harder to accomplish in Elixir, which also seems to get a rather clever gradual typing system.