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WeKiki — 4-person video chat platform where strangers become friends
WeKiki is a safe space to meet new friends on the Internet.
The community is vibrant and talking with others face to face helps build lasting relationships--many of our users, though geographically distant, have traveled to meet each other!
Each "party" consists of four video spots that can be filled by any user, or there's a sidebar chat.
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Congrats on the launch, Kiki! And great to finally meet you in person the other month at the PH / AL event :-)
Hi Product Hunt!
WeKiki is a simple Chrome video chat platform. There can be up to four participants in video, and more watching and in the sidebar chat.
We are currently only on Chrome, and non-mobile.
The four person format is intimate— I’ve found in Appear.in that groups larger than 4 either talk over each other and get chaotic, or the opposite. In groups of 6+ people will turn their cameras off for long periods of time, or play music, or otherwise lag the conversation.
Thank you in advance to the community for your questions, comments, and suggestions! I look forward to hearing what you have to say!
@kikischirr Sooooo been waiting for this to be posted :)
Blab obviously tried to do this before but couldn't get it to work (by their standards)
So what is going to be different with WeKiki?
@bentossell haha, you struck the balance between patience and urging me to post very well, I would say!
First, I would say that Blab was a magical product.
I am a former Blab user and I, like many others, mourned its eventual demise, even if the writing had been on the wall for a while. I have remained in touch with many of the people I met on Blab, and even met or hosted several of the people I knew only from the Internet.
So you might notice that this version of WeKiki looks rather familiar. We kept the 4-person format. There's an active sidebar chat. Many of the people are even the same, haha.
But 2 major things separate us even now:
1. We took a different route with the technology, attempting more P2P connections
2. We intend to monetize (because we are bootstrapping!)
And in the future we have plans to be very different--our monetization strategy is slotted to be private rooms. We will be offering private DMs. We will open our API to the addition of bots and other customizations.
But for now, we're rather retro.
Thanks for the question, Ben!
@kikischirr Awesome - yeah I understand that you and blab would have had very different intentions too so was curious to hear about it :)
@kikischirr Congrats on launching quickly and on bootstrapping WeKiki - and for the nerve to name it after yourself.
I put some time into building a product plan for a "better Blab" myself, and we decided against it. Assessing the competitive landscape for a product whose customers would financially sustain, it looked grim. I wish you success with that. I'm of the belief that people will pay for sex and will pay for a meeting product, if it beats competitors in some ways, but they will not pay to hang out. Find a couple people (or just Jaron) to bounce ideas off - people who are familiar with the competitive landscape and want you to win.
The monetization: there's honesty in this. The user knows what you're up to, what you want from him. You are not toying with him just to press his buttons and see what he will do, or collecting data on which videocalls he joins/creates, so as to later build an AI or sell him to advertisers. To be clear, this is why I never trusted the creators of Blab.
Coming from years of experience with videocalls, both party-type and meetings, when I encountered Blab, I found just two things that I continue to believe they did well:
1. allowing potentially more people in the videocall page (in the chat) than are in the videocall
2. they initially seeded the community well (as I heard, from Slack communities and Reddit)
Unfortunately, they quickly ceased putting any time into seeding the community. Please keep in mind that few people will quit using the site for the inevitable influx of trolls - if there are plenty of worthwhile people to hang with (and especially if they find that it's like every other day that they're meeting someone new and worthwhile.) So please seed this from beyond those who remember you from Blab.
tty soon, I'm sure.
Congrats on the launch, excited to see where this goes. I liked Blab a lot too, and I love the changes you've made to try and build something that will (hopefully) be more sustainable.
@mubashariqbal Thank you for the encouragement, Mubs. It means quite a lot from a skilled developer like you! :D
@larry_lawal I foresee there being 2 core groups of users:
The first I call "power users" --they're on WeKiki for long periods of the day and their goal is to hang out, meet people, and make friends. So their chats are casual, meandering conversations.
The second group I call "content creators" --they're on WeKiki to spread a message, whatever it might be. Right now, WeKiki doesn't have the marketing tools necessary to support all of their needs but as we expand our feature set, they will start showing up more often. I'm talking with Ricki Prime and a few other former Blab show hosts about creating something on WeKiki, and I've had interest from a few content creators who are new to video entirely!
Thanks for the question, Larry! :D Will I see you around on WeKiki?
@avizuber definitely a risk! But at the same time, it cuts down on young children and registered sex offenders, so I think there are definite benefits. :) Thank you!
I'm so excited to see "The old Blab" come back!
Interested to see what direction Kiki takes it!
You have so many evangelists on Twitter! Connected with a few over the past couple of days. I'll certainly have to try WeKiki. Coming from someone who missed his chance to Blab 😁
@angeliqueangiea @kikischirr definitely after this blizzard in Boston! Can't see anything in front of my feet! 🌨 ⛄ 🌬 💨
So awesome to see this hunted! I loved helping and being able to give some early feedback :)
I think the premise is an intriguing one; though I tend to be more of a lurker than anything else, I love the potential of being able to reach out and talk to a variety of people. It's one of the things which originally brought me to Blab and why I became a big supporter of their mission.
I think with WeKiki, there's an opportunity to fill a void which has been left since Blab shut down, especially as a place for people enthusiastic about these interpersonal dynamics to congregate.
Where do you see WeKiki going over the next 6-12 months?
Congrats on a great launch! :D
@adammarx13 Thank you Adam! I appreciate your support. ...and want to say thank you for being my guinea-pig-confidant-co-conspirator-muse in this project.
@kikischirr I think Guinea-Pig-Confidant-Co-Conspirator-Muse is what i'm gonna put on my business cards ha
Someone really missed blab :) Congratz on the launch!
I would have loved to know a bit more before connecting with fb. Is this an artistic choice or something to have no description on home page (like, to make the product kind of a mystery)? For example, I would have loved to know if other people can watch stream and only four people can broadcast, or if watching is limited to the four people broadcasting.
@oelmekki Ah, yes, Olivier, I would say that the lack of description was an artistic choice rather than a very practical one... We are currently designing a more explanatory page, but didn't get it up quite in time for our Product Hunt launch goal date.
If you click on Privacy Policy on the sign in page there's a basic explanation of the Facebook authentication and the setup, but you're right in that I need to make it more in-your-face!
Congrats @kikischirr! It seems like a lot of players have tried the live video space and haven't had much success (Meerkat, Blab, etc.) with others struggling to be truly mainstream (Facebook Live, Periscope, Houseparty). What are your thoughts on the video space and how do you see WeKiki fitting into the mix?
@ryabrams I think the live video space is actually a rather ripe fruit--there have been a lot of interesting players but not a breakout hit. People want it, but haven't found it.
I see WeKiki as being most similar to HouseParty--where friends go to hang out. The big difference (besides not being mobile) is that we aren't a walled garden. You can meet strangers on WeKiki. In fact, you're encouraged to interact with strangers regularly on WeKiki. It's the point.
WeKiki: Where Strangers Become Friends.
;)
Thanks, Ryan!
I tried too, on Chrome, Windows and it works well. Now it's time to grab a few more friends and start some parties. I like that @kikischirr is fully dedicated to it, this only makes a huge difference with blab.
@angeliqueangiea Angie, I owe you for all the outreach you've done on WeKiki. I will listen to your suggestions any day!
As others have said, would love if this were to fill the gap blab left. However, they really struggled with the monetization piece - I'm a bit skeptical that paid private chat rooms will fill that void (because at that point, aren't you just video chat like zoom?) but I hope you can make it work!
@afhill My big fear regarding private rooms is not that we will appear just like the competition, but that it will kill the urge to make new friends. So we'll have to approach it carefully. I'm considering making the rooms need to be ephemeral also, like the main rooms currently are. What do you think? Would that help?
@kikischirr could help.. and actually, I should apologize, I was being very "feature-focused" there. If your use case is "people come here to have great convos with smart people they don't know yet", it's really a very different problem you're solving than video conferencing. People probably wouldnt see them as competitiors.. but you COULD benefit from "I already use Wekiki to help me find new friends, why would I want to go off and use something else once I've found them?"
@afhill No need to apologize, you had an excellent point--didn't mean to divert the conversation, it's just that this has worried me for a bit. You're very right that the use case for the private premium rooms might not be apparent... Hm.
@kikischirr ya never know - think about all the sub-services that launched private twitter channels, etc. I always felt like blab had more of a chance to compete as a marketing/ brand awareness platform; maybe bring in some analytics, etc. If it could be used for marketers, you'd hit some legit budgets there!
@nishsticks hahha, Nisha, Levels was saying that it's like 4-person CR w/out the 🍆, and that might be my favorite WeKiki description yet! :D
The Shadow has many friends and even more enemies. Blab was a place where they come to hang out with me and spend time sharing things from Bitcoin ATMs to what the weather is like in the UK. We had some amazing times and started shows and did some life changing things. We actually all became family and friends in a group that spanned the globe. We have an eclectic group of friends from all over the world, Sausage in New York, Gabe in the South going walking, Pretto inventing things, and of course JS Gilbert keeping it hilarious. I made some amazing friends and always look forward to whatever insanity they are going to come up with next. From shows to social support and hangouts, the entire experience was transformative.
Unfortunately, all good things come to an end, and blab went away after a year. A lot of people stayed in touch and we kept things going, but it was not the same. Along came WeKiki and really brought it all back. Kiki brought us back smiles, laughs and a platform to let the good times roll, and I cant wait for things to get back to the way they were, amazing times with amazing friends. I love the WeKiki platform, still in its infancy, because this is a place where we can hang out with old friends and make some new ones. Looking forward to hanging out with you and really excited about the platform!
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