Comment by jpincheira | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jpincheira | Hacker News Reader

Hi HN!

I'm JP, founder of Standups.io. Last March, I resigned from my full-time iOS job with the idea of making a web/mobile app for async video standups. I did some traveling (China/Vietnam) while I started to work on the app, but eventually ended up back in Germany, escaping South Asia's rainy season :)

The idea of async video standups started to grow on me since last December when I was in the north of Brazil. I was there for some weeks doing remote work for my employer back in Germany, and I had to get up at 5 AM just to make it for the 10 AM standup back in Hamburg. This didn't feel right. Other team members were going through the same. So that's how it all started. Today I'm finally launching and I'm super excited to get your feedback. I'm solo founder, so it's been quite of a ride itself, but I'm looking forward to what's next :)

iOS and Android apps are coming next — in some more weeks, as I feel it's important to be able to post your standup update from anywhere, as long as you have an internet connection.

I'd love to hear your feedback (feature requests, bugs, etc) and personal experiences when it comes to team standups and how you guys are running standups with team members that are not on-site / distributed, or maybe as a full-remote team. I'm eager to implement some more features that might help this kind of team setups better. You can try Standups for free here: https://standups.io/register

Thank you so much!

JP

edit: typos

I love the idea! Where do you store the videos? What's your tech stack?

Maybe read/watch receipts for who has watched the videos right beneath the videos themselves would be an improvement.

Thanks so much. :)

I store the videos/media on S3 and use CloudFront for cache.

Tech stack is Node.js on Heroku, MongoDB, ReactJS with MobX (if you're doing ReactJS these I must say you _have_ to be using MobX, it's just amazing, shoutout to @mweststrate), Netlify (they're really great) and AWS Lambda.

Thanks for mentioning read/watch/"seen", as it is on the roadmap and will come in the next days. It can be toggled off, so final decision will be up to the manager/team :)

What about encoding? Are you doing that on the device or in the cloud? Curious if there were any latency challenges you had to dig into.

Thanks for asking. The encoding is on the device, that's right, as most of the times after the upload, the user can play out the video right away, and also to avoid extra work on the cloud transcoder/remuxer. In order to make sure that videos will be playable on all platforms (Web, Android, iOS) I need to transcode or remux, depending on the case (iOS doesn't decode VP8 sadly). :)

Awesome! Good idea, great execution!

I am also a brazilian (you too, right?) solo founder (https://www.oneonemeeting.com/, for one-on-one meetings); although I am keeping my day job.

We are forming a group of indie hackers around here in São Paulo to keep in touch. It seems you are in Germany now, but if you are interested, let me know! Email in the profile!

Good luck!

Cool app!

Congrats on the app! I saw it a few days ago. Best of luck! :) If anything just contact me to jp at standups.io or let's follow each other on Twitter, my handle is @restrex

I am from Chile, but left almost 10 years ago, but I try to come back as often as I can. If I ever make it to Sao Paulo, I'll let you know. :)

I like the concept but I do struggle with the price point for 1.5 minute videos per day.

Hello :) Thank you! The timebox will be toggleable soon, I just left it fixed during the first version waiting to get feedback on it. Storage space is not really an issue, so timebox will be defined by the manager/team.

I crunched the math earlier and it's something like... 35c a day for a reasonably standard North American tech worker workyear?

Doesn't seem that bad, especially to avoid the hassles of coordinating remote teams' standups (hell, even some colocated teams could benefit from this).

Let's be real here: this is an enthusiast price point. Very few decently sized sized teams will want to fit a 100$ a month into their budget for this little value add.

This is maybe even the point: fewer but enthusiastic customers to gather relevant feedback.

Haven't seen the ability to host the videos locally, so serious developers are out too. Potentially broadcasting valuable info isn't a big selling point.

so what's the price where you will sign up right now?

if I lower it to $3/user/month, will you sign up right now?

$3/user/month would signal to me to walk away. You can't possibly sustain at that rate if you ask me making investing in use of your tool a risk. Good software costs money, and deserves money, don't lower your prices too much. Consider them carefully.

No. never lower your prices because of a comment here. There will always be some cheapskate engineer here telling you your thing is too expensive.

That's fine. He is not your customer.

Your customer is businesses with money. Businesses that have seven dollars.

Those businesses, by the way, will just as happily spend $20/seat/month because that also rounds to zero for them. You can experiment with charging them that if you like. But whatever you do don't lower your prices. They're too cheap already.

Yes I already know that. I was trying to show brightball his comment about "price too high" is ridiculous

If $7 / month is too high, then any price below $7 is too high.

He should just outright say he wanted it for free, instead of complaining about price

I love the idea. I am working on something similar. Good luck to you :)

Thank you so much. Means a lot to, and gives me a ton of motivation :)

What stack are you using to record, trancode (?), and store the videos?

Thanks for asking! I was looking into the transcoding for quite some time, but due to my previous experience working at an IPTV company in Toronto (they sold a bunch of their channels to Rogers), I was familiar with ffmpeg / encoders in general. So I decided to skip Amazon Elastic Transcoder and do my own Lambda transcoder, which resulted in a way cheaper solution for it. All videos recorded are in H.264 and VP8 counterparts, for easy playout on iOS (H.264) and Android (VP8/H.264).

Did you roll your own recording front-end as well or is it done by file upload?

Out of curiosity, did you use ManyPixels for the design?

Very cool! Did you build this completely by yourself?

Hola :) Super glad you find it cool, really! Yes, it took me a couple months since March, but I got it running, and so far the whole stack is behaving super well!

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