Glimpse — 2 minute, 1-on-1, video conversations with your friends

Thank you Kat! 😊💖 Hey Product Hunt! 👋 When life gets busy, I’ve often found myself struggling to maintain meaningful relationships with people who matter to me. Living far away from my close friends/family has often been lonely. And as the co-founder of Glimpse, I’m always at work putting out classic startup 🔥 (usually one’s that I’ve created), making it hard to make time for calls. Unintentionally, I often neglect the most important part of my life: people. But what if “catching up” wasn’t something that happened once every few months when you run into each other on the street? What if staying connected was more meaningful than disconnected text messages, yet easier than hour-long calls? What if keeping in touch with people was EASY and part of your regular routine? Imagine a future in which the next time you’re standing in line waiting for a coffee, you spend those seemingly insignificant 2 minutes video chatting a friend. And those 2 minutes are plenty of time because even though she lives across the country, you’ve regularly “Glimpsed” into her life and never lost touch. Or imagine how different your family would be if 6 minutes of each week was spent video chatting with family? 2 min for mom, 2 for dad, and 2 for your sister. Relationships shouldn’t be something that you neglect. But it also shouldn’t be a chore to schedule time to catch up with your friends and family. That’s why we’re building Glimpse. So that your spare minutes aren’t wasted looking at photos of friends on Insta, but are instead converted to “Glimpses” that keep them in your life! Loneliness and relationships are two things that I care deeply about. I am proud to be working on a product designed to make it easier to keep the people who matter to you in your life! 😊 I would love for you to try out our product and to hear your feedback. 🥂Here’s to bringing people closer together! Brian, co-founder

Hey guys! Love the product :) Curious- what does starting a conversation with a friend of a friend look like on Glimpse? Also is there an option to extend a conversation past the 2 minute marker?

Thanks Kat 💙!! Hi PH community! I’m Helena 👋, one of the Glimpse founders I dropped out of Duke CS to build a startup, and this is my first time posting a product on Product Hunt!! We are beyond excited to share what we’ve been working on -- but also the story of how we got Glimpse built in 7 days: Version 0: We held up phones and matched people we knew over video chat, cutting them off at 2 minutes. People loved it. 🤩 Version 0.5: For some reason we decided people would want to do this with strangers. We built an app in 3 days, and got a hard no from Apple’s app review. We had built Chatroulette. Literally my greatest fear. 🙅‍♀️😳 We thought about it. What people loved about V0 was that they knew the people they were matched with would be either a friend, or a friend of a friend. It was the right kind of adrenaline rush. Version 1: We built for another 4 days, and launched Glimpse with friends. Create room. Add friends. Friends add friends. ⇒ This is the product we are excited to share with you today. There is still loads of work to do. But would love for you to try it out and let us know what direction to take! 🥳 Helena, co-founder

Downloaded, but just experienced something that’s happened before on PH. The newsletter from @rrhoover and team presents an app or tool in a way that sounds right up my alley. In this case that Glimpse is about interacting with your friends and not strangers. But when you go directly to the App Store, everything from the tagline to the description doesn’t quite match my expectations. I sent the newsletter to a couple of folks and one of them went to the App Store and agreed with me about the mismatch. If I were an app maker, I’d follow the cues and wording in that PH’s newsletter. 😊 Good luck and look forward to using Glimpse.

Was an early Glimpse user and had 6 interesting conversations while making breakfast. Got to meet some cool people

I think the 2 min limit is good but you need something more to keep yourself sustained. Otherwise you'll end up having to deal with a value proposition once Apple or Google Clone your features into their native apps. . Case in point Houseparty vs. Apple's Group Facetime.

This is pretty cool, especially right now with all the coronavirus social distancing. Good job folks!

Is there a way to keep in contact with new people I meet? I am always looking for a non-lame way for my friends to introduce me to their friends and this seems to solve the problem but what if I meet a mutual friend and don’t know who they are? Can I contact them after? Is that safe?

This is very interesting, would love to try it once the Android version comes out. Quick question: is there a mechanism to report inappropriate behaviour or abuse? If so, what consequences (if any) do being reported carry?

Thanks Kat ❤️ HELLO EVERYONEE! Also a Blue Devil 💙, besties with Helena and Brian, and employee 1 at Glimpse. We learned just a few hours ago that Duke too would be shifting to a remote campus for the remainder of the semester. It’s frustrating to know that we will miss out on not only the academic but social experience of one of the most formative parts of our lives. Our launch of Glimpse is coincidentally timely. I’m excited to join rooms of my friends who normally would be down the hall and have meaningful conversations. I want an authentic view into my friends’ lives, not the highlight reel of Instagram and FB. I hope you enjoy Glimpse as much as I do. Join, create a room, and invite allll your friends 🥳

this is awesome!! @helenamerk you've come so far from the YC hackathon, super excited to see how far this goes :)

This is amazing! Great job, Helena, Brian and Mary! I’ve “glimpsed" a couple times and I’m hooked already! Investing an entire hour when a friend calls is a lot, so when I’m busy I don’t pick up 😐 🙃. That’s led to a few months of no contact…totally on me. But if my friends had sent me a “glimpse” instead, and I knew the call would be two minutes, I would be SO down to take a break from my work. Can’t wait to keep using it and see how it evolves!

This is an really cool concept! Consumer social hasn't changed all that much in 5+ years and I'm excited to finally see more experimentation around formats & social graphs. Constraints breed creativity. Awesome work on building and shipping an entire brand + product in just one week 🚀

This is an amazing product! I've imported my whole contact list over to a Glimpse group and have had the chance to reconnect with many friends from the past.

This is legit. I’m usually bouncing all over the US and a few other countries like Iceland and Taiwan, so it’s hard for me to really focus on meeting people. After all, who wants to talk about basketball and tech and movies for 6 hours in a plane? But with Glimpse, I’m able to have quick conversations with people who might actually enjoy that, maybe even tell a joke to brighten their day for 120 seconds!

Could I use this for business? I would love to hear pitches or chat with potential partners for 2 minutes at a time. Would require 2 “types of users”, rather than any random pairing. But a cool future feature?

Love the idea and the product!! I feel a lot of times is hard to catch up with people because we "don't have time" and this makes it easier to do that!

Love this concept and can't wait to try it! Do you have a way to limit geographies to a neighborhood or an institution so we can maybe take it to real life?

Glimpse is an amazing product. The remaining time feature makes each second of the conversation count, and the matching process is seamless. Congratulations Brian and Helena on the launch!

Was the 2-minute limit arbitrary? I find it to be an exciting feature. I use social apps like Insta a lot but never for more than 5-minute intervals (waiting for coffee, etc.), would be cool to just tune in to a “radio of my friends” instead.