Agave

How is this different from gather.town?

Hi everyone 👋 We've been working on something over the past 6 months and we're ready to share it with you! Lots of great things were lost in the transition towards remote work, and having informal conversations is one of them. So we made it easy to have informal conversations with a lightweight desktop app where each person has their own desk, and the way you start a call is you just walk up to their desk and the video turns on. No Zoom links to share and no agendas, you can just walk up and start a conversation as if you were in the same room with someone. What are some example use cases? 💼 Bring job candidates in for interviews. You can now walk them by someone else's desk and start up quick video conversations, so things like introductions can happen again. 🗣 Talk to your customers. Your team is able to listen in on conversations as if they were a Clubhouse channel, as long as the conversation is not marked private. This is helpful for sharing customer insights in real-time with the rest of your team. 👋 Onboard a new employee. It's easy for them to call and meet other folks on your team. 💸 Raise money from investors. There's something viscerally exciting about seeing a team working together in real-time and executing, rather than see a static slide in your deck. Who did we build this for? We built something for ourselves that we'd want to use every day while we're working. We didn't want something that was always-on. We wanted it to be performant. We wanted it to balance privacy with convenience. We wanted high-quality video. We also wanted a way to invite friends or visitors into this experience and do something like drive-by introductions (this just doesn't happen on Zoom). We're working with some YC companies and we think this is great for cofounders, small product and eng teams within bigger companies, product managers, engineers, designers, and anyone who wants some amount of informal conversation and synchronous collaboration during their workday. How are we different? 🖥 We're a desktop app. We're friendly with your CPU and battery (or we try to be). The reason we chose desktop is to share your active app with teammates so they know (roughly) if it's a good time to walk up and start a conversation. We didn't want to be buried somewhere in browser tabs. If you invite visitors into your own office, they don't need to download anything and they can just use their browser. 🤗 We're fun. We've focused on making this feel more like a game. We think this helps make informal conversations easier, compared to Zoom where it feels more transactional and business-oriented. 👩‍🎨 We take a skeuomorphic approach. Everything we've done has been inspired by real-world office interactions, to the degree it makes sense and is convenient. Examples of this: listening in on conversations in real-time, walking up and talking to someone, and waving to get someone's attention. Want to try it out? Stop by our office for a live demo. We'll give you a visitor key when we see you enter the lobby. This will give you access to walk around and talk to us. For calls to connect, you should walk up next to one of us and stand on the closest rug (these are at our desks, the conference room, visitor lobby, and lunch table). Want your own? Drop a comment here. I'd love to hear what you think and answer any questions! 🙏

Very cool idea!