Hey Hunters 👋,
UPDATE: Send me a DM on Twitter to prioritize your Early Access! The PH community will receive priority invites.
Josh here, creator of Walkie, an app designed to facilitate stronger communication between teammates with less typing.
Walkie is the culmination of a lot of learning over the years about how teams work both co-located and remotely. We've tried to create a product that feels transparent—as in, you don’t think about using it—in order to better bridge the gap between being together in person and working from different locations. Our team has spent a lot of time optimizing the backend to get person-to-person connections to feel nearly instant.
The product is designed to align with the way folks work, while also being acutely aware of your privacy and availability. We've spent a lot of time experimenting with different ways to make the voice chat feel seamless but not disruptive—we're keenly aware just how annoying it is to be interrupted when deep in work.
While our team loves video products like Zoom, we also know how exhausting it is to constantly be on video call after video call and having to appear focused and attentive (or even just camera-presentable) all the time. Walkie is exclusively a voice-based product for this reason, and we feel strongly about this trade-off.
We've just started testing with a number of teams and are planning to provide more Early Access invites soon.
We’d love to hear your thoughts on the product, so please AMA below!
@chrismessina Thanks! Don’t get me wrong—Around looks great and I have a ton of respect for what they're doing.
Our key differentiator is the approach to availability and the speed of communication. Our focus is more on quick, short bursts of conversation that can happen off-handedly and don’t require an open two-way channel between both parties.
I could, say, use Walkie to ask you a quick question—whether or not you’re available—and you'll either hear it right away (if you *are* available) or you'll get notification so you can listen to it later. You can respond (or not) at any time. This way, conversations don’t *have* to be synchronous, but can happen at their own pace.
@endtwist cool, got it. Yeah, the blend of sync/async comms is interesting. I'm curious which teams would find Walkie most effective... and how proactive users need to be about setting their availability status.
Eventually I always end up setting my status to Away and expect people will DM me and I'll get back to them when I can... so basically, I rarely offer synchronous responsiveness.
I can imagine that smaller, more intimate teams who are actively collaborating (and working from home) wouldn't behave that way and thus Walkie would be more useful for them.
Any thoughts on offering this via Apple Watch (which already has a native Walkie-Talkie app)?
@chrismessina For sure! Our goal is to make availability management as non-existent as possible (meaning, you shouldn’t have to 'manage' your availability much if at all).
Ideally, Walkie should be just as useful to teams that spend more (or most) time in Do Not Disturb as those that would keep it active most of the time. We seamlessly support both use cases.
We haven’t settled on building out an Apple Watch app (yet) but we are planning a mobile app, so it’s not an impossibility!
This is almost exactly how we planned on Yac being from day one. Real time sometimes, async when you need to focus. We found that people just wouldn't turn on DnD though and therefore the whole experience just became massively distracting and a chore to maintain. Definitely looks like Yac 1.0 though. (OG yac UI linked below) https://youtu.be/wOEJZHPVxzs?t=13
@jmitch Hey there! I agree that if it’s handled poorly, the experience can be distracting.
We have a few ways (based on things we've learned from our previous product, Spacetime) we're going to mitigate that experience while keeping it as transparent as possible. Our goal is to have Walkie usage become something used by muscle-memory, and obviously we can’t do that if people need to actively 'manage' their availability.
@endtwist 100% agree. Hence why we reached out about integrating Spacetime haha. It's an awesome product that does a great job of automating availability.
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