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Sidekick — A new hardware device to connect remote teams
Sidekick (YC S20) is a new device that lets teammates work side by side during set coworking sessions. Teams at Coinbase, Brex, and Eventbrite use Sidekick to build strong team relationships while remote.
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@mykro Yes. They've found a way to charge $600 for a $200 Samsung Tablet by using some hyped up language to suggest that they're doing something innovate.
That's putting aside the fact that this is such an egregious breach of privacy the NSA would be proud.
You're basically creating a tool for the kind of micro managers no one wants to work for.
I'm an early tester of this product -- and will be the first to admit that I was pretty skeptical, both about always-on video as well as the need for a dedicated device. I'm a believer now, here's why:
- As a founder in a fully remote team, I need to stay constantly connected to my co-founder. Organic, easy information flow is a huge need in remote work. I can see if my co-founder is intensely focused and can drop in to ask questions or float new ideas if he's not.
- The sensation of actually working alongside someone in peripheral vision has actually made me *more* productive - like having a study buddy.
- Having touchpoints like waving to someone when you get to work, seeing what they're grabbing for lunch, etc. sound sort of ridiculous, but having that social foundation back really brings back the sense that you're working *with* someone and you're not just an isolated worker bee.
I'm an advocate of every product that makes pandemic work life better. ;) Really excited to see where they go with this!
My cofounder and I have been using Sidekick for the past couple weeks and we're enjoying it more and more. Being remote affects different teams in different ways but as a small team, who are in constant written (Slack) communication with each other Sidekick helps us share ideas better and solve problems faster.
I like this form factor. Technically I could use my iPad to achieve the same thing though.
@rrhoover I think if i was the person on the screen i would try my best to annoy you (sorry, not sorry)
@rrhoover Thanks for the feedback!
From interviewing teams that tried the hacked together Zoom on an iPad solution, it's really hard to consistently get the team in the room. Users are constantly leaving the room for external meetings and it's unclear when anyone's going to come back. Very quickly, the solution becomes useless because nobody's in the room and it's unclear when anyone will join.
Sidekick productizes this culture of joining and staying in the room. Unlike Zoom on a tablet, it treats "always-on" as a first-class problem to solve. Some examples of product decisions we've made are:
* Push notifications to minimize being alone in the room - when someone joins as the first person in the room, we send a notification to the rest of the team. We want to get other teammates in the room ASAP because the room is only useful with more than one person.
* Meeting mode - when you have a normal Zoom meeting with someone outside of your team, you can mark yourself as "in a meeting". This silences the mic and speakers on Sidekick while also setting a status informing your team that you're in a meeting. We're also releasing Google Calendar integration soon, allowing Sidekick to automatically mark itself as "in a meeting"
On average our users are in their Sidekick rooms for 6 hours a day. They turn it on first thing when they sit down in the morning and leave it on throughout all their meetings during the day.
I've been working remotely with my team for several months now and the biggest annoyance I've experienced is frantically trying to find the Facebook Messenger tab when a coworker calls me. I always end up having dozens of tabs. Having a dedicated device for this definitely seems like a no-brainer. What's the audio quality like? It would great if there was some kind of directional mic to block out background noise without needing a headset.
@mohamed_abedelmalik glad the idea resonates. We've done a lot of work on the software side to suppress background noise using RNNs while keeping human voices in the foreground - some of our early users work in noisy NYC apartment buildings and they've told us that almost none of it gets through to their teammates.
Hi PH! We are Andy, Howard, Greg and Arthur, founders of Sidekick!
Like many of you all, we were recently forced to start working remotely because of COVID. We quickly realized that starting a company while remote was brutal:
- 🧠 No spontaneous brainstorming - All of the best features we ever built were born out of unplanned conversations at our desks.
- 🗣 Increased miscommunication - Being able to quickly ask teammates clarification questions is key to making sure everything is staying on track.
- 🎭 Lack of team culture - True connections are forged in random 1-off conversations, not during scheduled meetings.
We use Sidekick every day because it's the closest thing to sitting in the same room. Sidekick is a video device that sits on each of your team members desks. On Sidekick, you schedule coworking sessions to simulate working side by side for a few hours a week.
🤔 Who's it for?
Sidekick is great for remote cofounders and other fast-paced teams that care about building a strong team bond. We're working with 20 Y Combinator companies along with teams at Bloomberg and Spotify.
We understand that Sidekick isn't for everyone! If you don't particularly want to talk to your team during the day, Sidekick probably isn't a great fit.
Until August 1st new teams get a discounted price of $25/user/month (normally it's $50/user/month). The hardware comes for free with the subscription and we cover the shipping.
We'd love to hear your feedback. If you have any thoughts or questions, please email me at andy@realismlabs.com.
This is great! Our current devices - laptop/phone/tablet - aren't really built for always-on video calling, and much less so for the remote work environment. Separating the call to a dedicated external device, while leaving you to work and use your own screens as you please, makes a world of difference. Super smart that you guys have focused your product and UX on this experience!
@conder thanks for the support Condor - you're exactly right, without a focused product it's incredibly hard to recreate the in-person work experience
We have used Sidekick for our remote team all day, everyday for months. It's an easy way to feel a sense of presence, connectedness, and camaraderie with our team.
Just ordered recently, can't wait to try out. Deeply believe in in-person communication , but there were unwanted costs to in-person work before the pandemic (the commute, co-location in hiring, terrible music at your co-working spot). I can see how a single-purpose rigid device is best way to be more like physical space, especially the "it just works" factor
I've been working remote with my teammates since COVID-19 starting, and we're either juggling endless zoom and hangout links just to cover basic questions, or were isolated from one another in a way that isn't what made working on our company fun in the first place. Instead, we've been experimenting with using always-on video services in the browser, but having my team hidden in a tab doesn't feel the same. I want the ability to say hi more spontaneously, and to feel like we're working together like we used to.
I haven't actually tried using Sidekick yet (waiting for mine to arrive shortly!) but excited to try it out and looking forward to feeling like we're in the same room again!
As someone working on a remote team, this really makes sense. We generally work together on our own stuff while keeping messenger or zoom on - but this slows down my computer and takes up one of my monitors. Honestly, this sounds like a great solution.
We've been using sidekick for over a month now and its been essential for keeping our team of 4 feel connected despite being in 3 different countries!
We use Sidekick for onboarding new, remote employees and love it. We have been able to shorten the learning curve and onboarding time by having instant, ad-hoc conversations vs. scheduling time to meeting. We have even displaced Slack with Sidekick for many conversations --- great product!
I'm the top user and first customer according to Andy, but maybe that's what he says to everyone ;). I use it every waking hour, i take it on walks, I use it as a coaster for my coffee, and I also A/B test it against zoom on ipad every month to decide if we should keep paying the license. Here's some thoughts:
- if you have the privilege of having a fairly affluent, all north america/europe team, lucky you. iPad is not plug-and-play in some parts of the world
- my 2013 mbp fan can't handle my dev environment and zoom. i can't even have more than a few chrome tabs open.
- i don't want to ruin my ipad or its battery keeping it on a video constantly (not sure if real concern)
...a lot more stuff too, feel free to ask me
long story short: paying for licenses is about delegating problems. last thing i want to deal with (again) is shipping an ipad and getting it confiscated at customs or "lost" by an employee i'm not in the same city as. i pay to delegate all these problems to Andy (and maybe you should too)
Sidekick literally brought me back into the "hacker house" with my co-founders (digitally), allowing us to constantly communicate and always stay in sync with ease. I probably have ~10 short conversations a day using Sidekick, and it is, by far, the most effective tool I've used to keep our founder communication going strong. Awesome product, awesome team behind it.
Thank you so much, Sidekick team!
We've been using Sidekick for many months now and it has been the most important remote work tool we've tried by far. We're a small team where pre-remote work all you had to do was spin your chair around in the office to speak with someone so going full remote was very challenging for us at first. There was enough of a hurdle to message someone on Slack, post a meeting link and wait for them to join that we found we weren't having the short, "I just had an idea", or "could you help me really quick so I don't spend an hour trying to figure this out myself" conversations we used to have which really started scaring us so we gave Sidekick a try and haven't felt the need to look for any other remote work tools since.
Feels like kinda breaks the point of working remotely and having a more relaxed and productive day.
@danielamoitinho Thanks for sharing! We built Sidekick for tight-knit teams that need to be working in the same room, but it's definitely not for everyone. Our initial users actually love being able to spontaneously talk with their cofounders.
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