Let's build a webinar tool that doesn't suck | Hacker News Reader

Let's build a webinar tool that doesn't suck

survey.getgrasp.io

26 pointsalex_ka39 comments

Tells me basically nothing about the product. Wants email address.

I see this trend far too often.

They don't have a product. They want to build one. Thats the difference and pretty smart in that market.

i'm with you are on this one as well. i'm tried of seeing these "startup" sites that basically show you nothing of the product yet want you to trust them with your email address. how do i know there is even a product behind this site? this could all be an elaborate attempt at email harvesting a niche group.

Maybe some "startups" using this technique to harvesting email addresses. But in this case, we need the email to inform about the current progress and select future beta users. We know the problem with this kind of landing pages, but this is a good way to proof the concept, acceptance, get feedback and work together with future customers.

No offense but that is exactly what all those "startups" do... or say they do.

...we need the email to inform about the current progress and select future beta users.

So why don't you hint about it in the landing page?

My process was:

  1. Open the page
  2. Saw "build your own webinar tool"
  3. Saw email field
  4. Saw join button

and thought: "If I enter my email in this box this will give me access to some kind of personalizable webinar tool, but I don't know if I need this yet", then closed the page.

You need to rework the landing page so the visitor knows what they are doing exactly when they click the "JOIN NOW!" button.

I think you might need to come up with a different term, because my brain's finding it too hard to imagine "webinar" and "not suck" together. :)

Yeah that's what i thought too... But it's harder to find one than using a existing term that sucks :)

let's stop using the word webinar

Any better ideas?

Semineb.

I would love to stop using webinar. It reminds me of those web 2.0 buzzwords crap we all had to endure.

Unfortunately the markets for webinars understands the term, therefor it remains alive.

They never say what's wrong with existing products. I'm sure they aren't perfect but they do the following:

Everyone is familiar with them

They're reliable and scalable

They're cheap for the presenter to use

They have clients for Mac, PC, iDevices...

> Everyone is familiar with them

I would say that "most people" never used "webinar" software, so everyone doesn't really cut it here.

> They're reliable and scalable

My last experiences where rather on the other side - Hangout often crashes on me and gotomeeting had problems with audio quality.

> They're cheap for the presenter to use

What is cheap, if they don't really work for me?

Also, they mostly are general video calling solutions and rarely geared towards running e.g. a workshop.

> They have clients for Mac, PC, iDevices...

Yep, but there is always a plus to established players.

In general, I think that the whole webinar space still has a lot of ground to cover, so new players are always welcome.

There is a german startup around my corner that already delivers unsucky webinar tech: http://www.slidepresenter.com/en/

@alex_ka - maybe you should have a talk with them …

It's redirecting me to the German version (http://survey.getgrasp.io/de), not a great way to welcome traffic from The Netherlands... :)

It redirects you depending on your browser language... Maybe a bug! Here is the en version: http://survey.getgrasp.io/en

Redirects me to the DE page as well (and it shouldn't), pretty strange bug.

Where are you from? Maybe you can give me your browser lang code from http://aruljohn.com/lang.php That would be great :)

You probably redirect based on the first found locale. Most Dutch users browser with an accept language similar to "nl,en-GB;q=0.8,en;q=0.6,en-US;q=0.4".

If you only match on the first ("full") locale and not paying attention to the lower q-valued locales, you might think English is not accepted and you will redirect to your (default?) German site. It's a pretty common bug in locale detection systems (as I designed a few ones myself) :)

Here is similar one : Big Blue Button (http://bigbluebutton.org/) is an open source web conferencing system for distance education.

Tried it ?

Tried their demo setup, few months ago (around the time when they graduated from Mozilla WebFWD). Keen to try out getgrasp.

I'm the project manager for BigBlueButton. Our goal is to provide remote students a high-quality on-line learning experience. Building an open source web conferencing system is no small task, but it is very satisfying.

I noticed in their 'about us' they stated "That’s why we built dozeo". Funny, I thought they built dozeo using BigBlueButton :-).

Want to try another demo? We're adding webRTC audio to BigBlueButton. Check out http://webrtc.blindsidenetworks.com/.

At the beginning we used BBB for our prototypes, but we have developed a completely new infrastructure and client over the last years.

Cool. I wish you all possible success in your project!

Ever had a close look at it? It is pretty much a mess tied together with duct tape. I've been sifting through it for a month and finally decided that you cannot use it to build a product on top of that.

Yep, I tried it last week. It still requires Ubuntu 10.04 and from what I can see isn't very portable to other distributions.

Adobe Connect is a Webinar tool that doesn't suck.

But the price sucks!

Would you be able to offer something cheaper?

We will definitely be cheaper. We are also thinking about a freemium and revenue share model. What do you think?

Startups perform best when they focus on making money in one specific way. The model you choose should be based on the economics of the software, for example how much it costs to support additional users.

It uses AIR right? Then... it kinda sucks. Ask any long-time League of Legends player about the client (made in Adobe AIR) you'll know what I mean.

I am a long-time player and while yes, the client has problems I think it's not AIR's fault. AIR is fine, maybe not perfect but it's not a good enough reason to ditch all the apps that are made with it. It's like saying "I will not browse any website made with PHP".

Would you like me to show you some terrible programs written in JavaScript? Any platform that has programs written for it has bad programs written for it.

It is true that League of Legends players generally think Adobe AIR sucks. It's also true that League of Legends players generally think they deserve to be at least Gold I. In neither case are these beliefs rational.

I do not believe Adobe Connect uses AIR. In a desktop browser; it uses Flash Player.

I thought the mobile client was built natively (Objective-C) on iOS, but don't quote me on that.

Okay. I filled-in the survey. Will be waiting for the beta.

Thx! We'll keep you up to date!

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