Switchboard — Work side-by-side, even when you’re not in the same room

It's been a while since I've been so stoked about a gamechanger like Switchboard. You really have to try it to understand how it completely rewrites your expectation of digital collaboration. It's no longer "screen sharing"... it's literally "screen coworking" — where everyone in the virtual room can directly interact with everyone else's browsers and apps. No joke, your mind is going to be blown. 🤯

Totally great! So well said, and thanks for sharing your story! ^_^ Big congratulations on the launch! The idea is amazing! ^_^ Can you tell me please, is it possible to form more groups/rooms on one account, is there a limit? :))

Congrats team on an awesome product. We at UUKI an online community platform for creators are interested in a potential collaboration with Switchboard. Can you share what is the best way to reach out ?

Amir and team, congratulations! Nice launch! A quick question, have you thought about how a hardware team can collaborate remotely? Imaging two engineers (1 hardware, 1 firmware) need to sit together playing the oscilloscope to get right wire frequencies. I ask because we are a hardware team, I'm looking for ways to be fully remote (at least hybrid).

Congrats on the launch team. This app looks great and easy to use. Good luck improving how remote teams work!

As someone working on a collaboration platform, I love the way you allow teams to work together in multiple apps at the same time. Looks very convenient!

Hey, Product Hunt community! I’m Amir, founder of Switchboard. Thanks for the hunt, @chrismessina. We're just coming out of stealth after two years of development and are *super* excited to share Switchboard with you and hear what you think. 🎸 But first, a quick story. I picked up a new hobby before the pandemic – guitar. In-person? Fantastic. Virtually? It wasn’t the same. My teacher and I could never manage to start our metronome at the same time and we struggled seeing each other, our guitars, and our sheet music simultaneously. Those lessons were the catalyst for the product we are launching into beta today: Switchboard, a cloud coworking space. We power remote work by bringing together teams and tools for side-by-side collaboration. ⛅️ What’s a cloud coworking space? It’s a collaboration tool designed for remote work: part cloud browsers, part conference room, part video call. Our team has been dogfooding our product daily. We’re a fully remote company and we no longer use Zoom or Google Meet. But this didn’t happen overnight. We talked to hundreds of people about how remote work could be better. We built Switchboard based on these shared beliefs: 👆 Everyone deserves a voice (and a cursor). Other “collaboration” platforms require us to be hosts or participants. We can see and hear each other, but it’s hard to actually do things together. So we developed cloud browsers. They’re fast, secure, and because they live in the cloud, that means you don’t have to share your screen to see apps, images, or PDFs. Instead, you work side-by-side with your coworkers in multiplayer browsers. It’s more like sitting on the same side of the table – collaborating, not just communicating. 🔌 Every app must work without an integration. You know what tools work best for you and your team. That's why we created shared browsers that support every web-based app. Whether you use Notion or Coda, Trello or Monday, Figma or Canva, all apps work in Switchboard. And you can work in apps next to each other within a Switchboard room. 🕰 Reinventing the wheel for every meeting wastes time. It should be easy to start from where you left off in every meeting, without scrambling to find the right Chrome tab and your notes. Our rooms have what we’ve been calling “meeting memory.” Content is saved in rooms so it’s there when you need it. 🔒 Rooms should be easy to access but also secure. No one wants to download another app. Entering a room needs to be fast and intuitive. But we also need to make sure we know who has keys to the office, so to speak. Switchboard is web-based, meaning all you need is a browser. We’ve set up guest and member settings to control room access. We’re also SOC 2 compliant, meaning we work in your best interest to keep your information safe. 💊 We need a pain killer, not another vitamin. There are so many collaboration tools coming out of the woodwork. Our tool needs to be much better, not just a little better. We can’t imagine going back to getting work done over video calls. Now it’s time to see if you think so too. Try Switchboard for your next meeting and let us know what we got right and what we got wrong. Sign up today and get full access for free through the end of 2022. 👋 Come visit us here and say hello @ 11 am PT: https://www.twitch.tv/getswitchb...

Haha, looks safe with the "avoid accidental oversharing" feature! Congrats on the launch, will share this with my colleagues. Although we're working at the office and only a few days from home, I think, it can be useful! Good job! Btw, we’re launching in late May or the beginning of June. Check out our upcoming PH page: www.producthunt.com/upcoming/eff... Our project is called: Effecto. It’s an app for detailed habits, health, symptoms, and meds tracking. Pretty much for everything that is related to your physical or mental health and every daily factor that can affect you.

Very nice, this looks amazing! Is there a plan for pricing after the end of the year? It would be nice to know whether there will be a free plan etc so that companies can adopt it with confidence that they're not going to be expected to pay or lose access at a moment's notice.

Very slick design and solves a real problem. I see it is free now - do you have an idea what pricing would look like long term?

Saves so much time for multiple teams (sales, engineering, etc.) — basically like having physical meeting rooms that are set up when you walk in!

This is a really cool idea. No more "Can you see my screen?" every time we want to collaborate on a different document/app. Congratulations on the launch!

Hey everyone! I've been working at Switchboard for the past year+ and am happy to answer any of your questions! As for me, I’m a visual, hands-on thinker which makes remote work challenging. I am so old school that I still write things down in a notebook because the act of writing creates muscle memory (and a paper trail!). When I met Amir and learned about his vision for Switchboard, however, everything clicked. Seeing content side-by-side, being able to write/click/scroll alongside other people, having the ability to add things in the moment rather than one person sharing at a time – it helps me work the way my mind works. As a marketer, it’s less about the technology and more about what it can unlock: ideas, creativity, camaraderie. Tell us how you’re thinking of using Switchboard with your team and how we can make it better. Feedback is a gift!

👋🏼 Hi everyone and thanks so much for your support! While doing research early last year, we spoke to dozens of PMs, project managers, designers, and engineers to hear about their experiences working remotely during the first year of the pandemic. Though most agreed that videoconferencing solutions like Zoom and Google Meet saved the day as we suddenly found ourselves working from home, I wanted to more deeply understand where these tools fell short and what problems we could help address with Switchboard. The feelings were overwhelmingly consistent: 🌎 We gained so much flexibility in being able to work from anywhere, but we lost the ability to have spontaneous conversations with our teammates 📉 It’s just hard to get things done together. Working on a project means spending time across a number of different web applications at the same time and trying to juggle them on a video call feels like... juggling. 😵‍💫 It’s exhausting to stare at faces all day 🚨 Sharing your screen is stressful. We're worried about notifications popping up, accidental oversharing, and privacy overall. 🌪 We always have (what seems like) hundreds of browser tabs open with important documents and web-apps waiting to be shared — it's a mess and it slows down our computers. Our mission is to help teams overcome these issues and make teamwork the best part of work. And since we’re a fully remote company, we live on the Switchboard platform everyday and we each feel the relief we’re hoping others experience while using it. We want to build the best tools for remote work, and define through our experiences, a set of exemplary practices for building remote companies that will will enable the next generation of startups and innovations. I’d love to hear what you think about Switchboard and how we can make it even better!

We've shifted nearly all our meetings to Switchboard it's been a game changer for productivity and collaboration.

it's a good move (and risky) to think outside the box and focus on a web version rather than a desktop app like your compititors did, let's see what people think about it in the incoming months :) btw is there an intership position (remote) for junior dev (react + node + postgres) i'll be happy to join a new mission to build the next productivity tool to connect remote teams (i'm outside the US) ?

VP of Eng @ Switchboard here. Thank you Product Hunt for the support! At Switchboard, we’re hiring a fully remote team, and have to walk the walk when it comes to both remote culture and tools to enable seamless remote collaboration. We’re still learning best best practices, but having Switchboard as the tool where we run collaborative meetings, 1-1s, or brainstorming sessions has been game changing. Not only can we learn from the experiences of our customers, but by building a product that we heavily dogfood, we can learn how to optimize our own experience and incorporate those learnings into Switchboard. One of my favorite ways to use Switchboard is our weekly on-call handoff meeting. In this meeting we test and tweak our PagerDuty schedule, look up DataDog logs from incidents, look up tickets in Linear, our issue tracker, follow an agenda, and sometimes look up product analytics in Amplitude. These 4 or 5 web apps live in our weekly On-call Handoff room and we can jump in and immediately start the handoff. While one engineer is looking up logs and tickets from the incidents, the others can tweak the schedule. When one is ready to present, they just hit a button, and all other engineers begin to follow. It makes collaboration really easy, and eliminates the 5 minute prep before the meeting to open all the necessary tabs and screenshare. It also allows for seamless transitions between engineers, particularly if they are solving a problem together. I find this meeting to be more efficient run remotely than in person now, thanks to being able to work together in the tools we already use within Switchboard. This is just one example of a meeting that works better using Switchboard. I'm happy to answer any questions about the product, use cases, our own experience with the product, or our experience building a remote team.

Congrats Danny and team! We are a fully remote company and while at first it was fun and novel - now that we are 2 years in we are craving ways to recreate more of the in-person dynamics in a distributed team. Really excited to check it out for our team.

Love the concept. This feels like the best of Around and Tandem. Question about security: Entering usernames and passwords through the platform raises concerns, are there plans to avoid passing credentials through Switchboard?

I've had the wonderful opportunity of designing this product along the Switchboard team. As a designer, having had to design a solution which has never before been created had its own challenges, but I could not be more proud of the work which has been bought to life. 👏 My favourite use of Switchboard has been the ability to use Figma within Switchboard for our design reviews. No more asking "Do you see my screen", sharing of the links or an agenda. Everything is located within our design room and the team can access it anytime and check out upcoming features we're working on. 👩‍🎨