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Switchboard — Work side-by-side, even when you’re not in the same room
Get more done together in interactive rooms for remote meetings and projects. Work side-by-side in the tools you already use: web-based apps, images, files, and PDFs. No need to share your screen or toggle between tabs. Just teamwork, like it used to be.
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Chauncey TK Hamilton
We've shifted nearly all our meetings to Switchboard it's been a game changer for productivity and collaboration.
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It's been a while since I've been so stoked about a gamechanger like Switchboard. You really have to try it to understand how it completely rewrites your expectation of digital collaboration. It's no longer "screen sharing"... it's literally "screen coworking" — where everyone in the virtual room can directly interact with everyone else's browsers and apps.
No joke, your mind is going to be blown. 🤯
@chrismessina, This means a lot coming from you. Thanks for being a fan from the beginning!
Very slick design and solves a real problem. I see it is free now - do you have an idea what pricing would look like long term?
@ugwigr Hi Gregory, we are still working on pricing details and will share them soon, but there will always be a free version of Switchboard and if you sign-up today, Switchboard will remain free through 2022. Really looking forward to your feedback!
Thank you @ugwigr We’ll announce pricing later this year but we’ll give everyone a big heads up. We’re providing free access until the end of 2022 for people who sign up early
Congrats on the launch team. This app looks great and easy to use. Good luck improving how remote teams work!
Thank you @milkers ! It was not easy to make those cloud browsers work within a browser but the team did it 🚀
Wow - operating reviews, all-hands, GAME NIGHTS?! I keep thinking of more and more use cases for this... congrats on the launch!
@bosmeny And design reviews, 1:1s, and team meetings too! Can't wait to hear what you think of the product experience.
Amir and team, congratulations! Nice launch! A quick question, have you thought about how a hardware team can collaborate remotely? Imaging two engineers (1 hardware, 1 firmware) need to sit together playing the oscilloscope to get right wire frequencies. I ask because we are a hardware team, I'm looking for ways to be fully remote (at least hybrid).
@seansong hi Sean! We definitely want Switchboard to be the best platform for all remote teams. One way we will make this possible for hardware-focused teams is by allowing you to add multiple cameras to a room that you can use to share a physical whiteboard, a screen on a hardware device like an oscilloscope, or even a fresh prototype straight from the CNC machine. You can try it today by pressing Option+E while in a room to surface a QR code you can scan with your phone’s camera. It’s still being tested internally, but I’d love for you to give it a try and let me know what you think.
Hey @manna we believe in it too :-) Thank you for helping us with the launch!
👋🏼 Hi everyone and thanks so much for your support!
While doing research early last year, we spoke to dozens of PMs, project managers, designers, and engineers to hear about their experiences working remotely during the first year of the pandemic. Though most agreed that videoconferencing solutions like Zoom and Google Meet saved the day as we suddenly found ourselves working from home, I wanted to more deeply understand where these tools fell short and what problems we could help address with Switchboard. The feelings were overwhelmingly consistent:
🌎 We gained so much flexibility in being able to work from anywhere, but we lost the ability to have spontaneous conversations with our teammates
📉 It’s just hard to get things done together. Working on a project means spending time across a number of different web applications at the same time and trying to juggle them on a video call feels like... juggling.
😵💫 It’s exhausting to stare at faces all day
🚨 Sharing your screen is stressful. We're worried about notifications popping up, accidental oversharing, and privacy overall.
🌪 We always have (what seems like) hundreds of browser tabs open with important documents and web-apps waiting to be shared — it's a mess and it slows down our computers.
Our mission is to help teams overcome these issues and make teamwork the best part of work. And since we’re a fully remote company, we live on the Switchboard platform everyday and we each feel the relief we’re hoping others experience while using it.
We want to build the best tools for remote work, and define through our experiences, a set of exemplary practices for building remote companies that will will enable the next generation of startups and innovations.
I’d love to hear what you think about Switchboard and how we can make it even better!
Tried your app with my team — works really good especially for beta.
Good luck, guys! 👍
Those recurring meetings around the same docs and with the same people are never going to be the same again 🔥🔥🔥
@bgaurav Exactly! We use it every day. It saves the prep time as each meeting starts exactly where we left it off the last time. Thank you 🎉
Saves so much time for multiple teams (sales, engineering, etc.) — basically like having physical meeting rooms that are set up when you walk in!
@trevorsookraj Glad it's been saving your team time! It's totally like a physical meeting room... except you don't have to write "Do not erase!" all over when you leave.
Thanks @trevorsookraj, and I agree completely! I have a few meetings that repeat every week, and it's great to have dedicated rooms for those.
So excited about this! Absolutely astonishing team building a product that is much needed! 🎉 Cannot wait to watch this take flight! Congrats!!
@camille_ricketts1 Notion is one of our favorite apps to use in Switchboard. Thanks for being a fan from the beginning!
VP of Eng @ Switchboard here. Thank you Product Hunt for the support! At Switchboard, we’re hiring a fully remote team, and have to walk the walk when it comes to both remote culture and tools to enable seamless remote collaboration. We’re still learning best best practices, but having Switchboard as the tool where we run collaborative meetings, 1-1s, or brainstorming sessions has been game changing. Not only can we learn from the experiences of our customers, but by building a product that we heavily dogfood, we can learn how to optimize our own experience and incorporate those learnings into Switchboard.
One of my favorite ways to use Switchboard is our weekly on-call handoff meeting. In this meeting we test and tweak our PagerDuty schedule, look up DataDog logs from incidents, look up tickets in Linear, our issue tracker, follow an agenda, and sometimes look up product analytics in Amplitude. These 4 or 5 web apps live in our weekly On-call Handoff room and we can jump in and immediately start the handoff. While one engineer is looking up logs and tickets from the incidents, the others can tweak the schedule. When one is ready to present, they just hit a button, and all other engineers begin to follow. It makes collaboration really easy, and eliminates the 5 minute prep before the meeting to open all the necessary tabs and screenshare. It also allows for seamless transitions between engineers, particularly if they are solving a problem together. I find this meeting to be more efficient run remotely than in person now, thanks to being able to work together in the tools we already use within Switchboard. This is just one example of a meeting that works better using Switchboard.
I'm happy to answer any questions about the product, use cases, our own experience with the product, or our experience building a remote team.
@bosmeny indeed it can! I actually have been using it to plan my own wedding. Having rooms dedicated for meetings with vendors, the moms, and the wedding planner helped me organize all my content for each meeting. For each vendor, the invoice, notes, agenda, and browsers open to the venue and their sites. Really useful for these kinds of projects!
@farokh_shahabi Thanks, we believe cloud browsers are essential for collaboration and this is just the beginning... :-)
@farokh_shahabi Thanks! We hope you love the product, too. If there is anything we can do to help your team with remote collaboration, you know where to find us!
Love the concept. This feels like the best of Around and Tandem. Question about security: Entering usernames and passwords through the platform raises concerns, are there plans to avoid passing credentials through Switchboard?
@nikdotca thanks! Security and privacy are of utmost importance to us, and our current architecture will finish SOC 2 Type 2 audit soon. We're also prototyping new tech that will allow us to handle credentials differently. So, the short answer to your question is "yes" :). We would love to start a longer discussion -- feel free to drop a line at chris@switchboard.app!