Glimpse — 2 minute, 1-on-1, video conversations with your friends

Thanks Kat 💙!! Hi PH community! I’m Helena 👋, one of the Glimpse founders I dropped out of Duke CS to build a startup, and this is my first time posting a product on Product Hunt!! We are beyond excited to share what we’ve been working on -- but also the story of how we got Glimpse built in 7 days: Version 0: We held up phones and matched people we knew over video chat, cutting them off at 2 minutes. People loved it. 🤩 Version 0.5: For some reason we decided people would want to do this with strangers. We built an app in 3 days, and got a hard no from Apple’s app review. We had built Chatroulette. Literally my greatest fear. 🙅‍♀️😳 We thought about it. What people loved about V0 was that they knew the people they were matched with would be either a friend, or a friend of a friend. It was the right kind of adrenaline rush. Version 1: We built for another 4 days, and launched Glimpse with friends. Create room. Add friends. Friends add friends. ⇒ This is the product we are excited to share with you today. There is still loads of work to do. But would love for you to try it out and let us know what direction to take! 🥳 Helena, co-founder

This is amazing! Great job, Helena, Brian and Mary! I’ve “glimpsed" a couple times and I’m hooked already! Investing an entire hour when a friend calls is a lot, so when I’m busy I don’t pick up 😐 🙃. That’s led to a few months of no contact…totally on me. But if my friends had sent me a “glimpse” instead, and I knew the call would be two minutes, I would be SO down to take a break from my work. Can’t wait to keep using it and see how it evolves!

Thank you Kat! 😊💖 Hey Product Hunt! 👋 When life gets busy, I’ve often found myself struggling to maintain meaningful relationships with people who matter to me. Living far away from my close friends/family has often been lonely. And as the co-founder of Glimpse, I’m always at work putting out classic startup 🔥 (usually one’s that I’ve created), making it hard to make time for calls. Unintentionally, I often neglect the most important part of my life: people. But what if “catching up” wasn’t something that happened once every few months when you run into each other on the street? What if staying connected was more meaningful than disconnected text messages, yet easier than hour-long calls? What if keeping in touch with people was EASY and part of your regular routine? Imagine a future in which the next time you’re standing in line waiting for a coffee, you spend those seemingly insignificant 2 minutes video chatting a friend. And those 2 minutes are plenty of time because even though she lives across the country, you’ve regularly “Glimpsed” into her life and never lost touch. Or imagine how different your family would be if 6 minutes of each week was spent video chatting with family? 2 min for mom, 2 for dad, and 2 for your sister. Relationships shouldn’t be something that you neglect. But it also shouldn’t be a chore to schedule time to catch up with your friends and family. That’s why we’re building Glimpse. So that your spare minutes aren’t wasted looking at photos of friends on Insta, but are instead converted to “Glimpses” that keep them in your life! Loneliness and relationships are two things that I care deeply about. I am proud to be working on a product designed to make it easier to keep the people who matter to you in your life! 😊 I would love for you to try out our product and to hear your feedback. 🥂Here’s to bringing people closer together! Brian, co-founder

Thanks Kat ❤️ HELLO EVERYONEE! Also a Blue Devil 💙, besties with Helena and Brian, and employee 1 at Glimpse. We learned just a few hours ago that Duke too would be shifting to a remote campus for the remainder of the semester. It’s frustrating to know that we will miss out on not only the academic but social experience of one of the most formative parts of our lives. Our launch of Glimpse is coincidentally timely. I’m excited to join rooms of my friends who normally would be down the hall and have meaningful conversations. I want an authentic view into my friends’ lives, not the highlight reel of Instagram and FB. I hope you enjoy Glimpse as much as I do. Join, create a room, and invite allll your friends 🥳

Any plans for Android?

I really love this app - not many apps allow for both large group conversations, face to face convo’s, AND a way to meet new people. This app helped me better stay in touch with friends when school was cancelled indefinitely due to corona virus. I’m excited that many more of my friends have started to join the app too!!

This is very interesting, would love to try it once the Android version comes out. Quick question: is there a mechanism to report inappropriate behaviour or abuse? If so, what consequences (if any) do being reported carry?

Hey guys! Love the product :) Curious- what does starting a conversation with a friend of a friend look like on Glimpse? Also is there an option to extend a conversation past the 2 minute marker?

Love this concept! Wishing Glimpse all the best!

Super cool experience - Glimpse has helped me meet new people and keep in touch with friends who I haven't seen in a long time! I was able to meet a lot of new people who I still keep up with after a quick chat on Glimpse, and it's a totally new experience to be able to talk to friends on Glimpse on the fly and side step the stress and last minute cancellations that occur when setting up meet up times. Looking forward to seeing the app getting better and better!

Could I use this for business? I would love to hear pitches or chat with potential partners for 2 minutes at a time. Would require 2 “types of users”, rather than any random pairing. But a cool future feature?

Love the idea and the product!! I feel a lot of times is hard to catch up with people because we "don't have time" and this makes it easier to do that!

Is there a way to keep in contact with new people I meet? I am always looking for a non-lame way for my friends to introduce me to their friends and this seems to solve the problem but what if I meet a mutual friend and don’t know who they are? Can I contact them after? Is that safe?

Exciting! Can’t wait to see how the product grows over time!!!

Hello Helena - how did you make this so quickly? with what tools/frameworks/infrastructure? Thx.

Love this app! I’ve been wanting to meet people for a while but I go to a pretty small school and see the same people over and over again. Using glimpse made me realize that there’s a whole world outside my school’s little bubble.

Omg, this is perfect. This is such a convenient way to be able to talk to people but also have an easy out. I would talk to and catch up with friends so much more if someone could promise me I wouldnt end up on hours-long FaceTimes. I love them but there’s only so much time in the day. I really think this will make maintaining my personal relationships so much more manageable. THANK YOU.

I love this….feels like a ~social slack~. Channels = rooms. Slacking = chatting. Love being able to bring my people into rooms and know who is here to talk to at any time and have a guaranteed commitment going in.

Intuitive and fun to use, with potentially a great impact on how we engage

As a college student whose school was abruptly shut down due to COVID-19, this app truly hit home for me. The college experience is unique not because of the stellar faculty members or quality of the dining hall food – it's truly about the peers you are surrounded by. With millions of students across the United States being forced—albeit for good reason—to say confined to their homes, I can really see Glimpse being a game changer. Not only can us students continue to remain in contact with our existing friends, but Glimpse enables us to tap into our college community virtually and meet new people through various college "Rooms." It's truly unique for an app to empower me to go beyond my comfort zone and form new bonds with those who I only "see around" but never actually talk to. I'm looking forward to seeing where Glimpse goes from here!