Had launched something like this in 2016. We had called it as ering.me, so you could have an url like ering.me/handle. Used it in email signatures, web calling etc. It didn't pick up at that time or we didn't market enough :)
Hope the market is mature now and products like this succeed. All the best.
I'm not really surprised. The people who grew up with phone calls and who like to "hop on a call" to work out issues are all aging out. They are in their fifties at the youngest, if not already retired. It's my experience that far fewer younger people reach for the phone as a first means of contact. It's not preferred, and they try to avoid it.
And by "call" I mean direct, synchronous, real-time conversation. Whether literally a phone call, or an online voice or video call.
The nice thing about real time calls is they help avoid confusion, convey more emotion and information than most messages can.
There is less ambiguity usually during a real conversation.
Conversations tend to resolve very quickly because in the span of five minutes we can go back and forth on multiple questions, get clarity and finalize how we want continue. Some things require this but not everything. There is a balance as with everything.
A small thing that might be useful: allow users to get a regular phone number to call. Most users probably won't need it, some will, and when they need it and there's no number, it's extremely frustrating for the (potential or current) customer.
Example: in most cases, I don't have a microphone or headset on my office desktop PC (don't need it, we don't do zooms), have very slow internet access on my smartphone (forget OnAir calling with it, and anyway it would be too much friction to reopen the same web page on it just to call), but have a very well working landline phone nearby.
One possibility you might think about is to get a VoIP number terminated at your server (and possibly a free 1-800-xxxx but those don't necessarily work from abroad), where people can call, enter a code displayed by the OnAir client in the web page (like an extension ID, but it might be random if there's a value in obliging people to come to the web page before calling, e.g. to limit spam calling), and once done they'd be connected as if they were calling through the web page. The limitation with this solution here is that you'd need a number for each country you want to support, as international calls easily get expensive, especially from mobile.
Why does that need to be part of the app? You can just put a phone number on your website next to the call button.
We actually do that. We have just released a web widget which maps to your current phone number IVR or voice bot flow. Have put a quick link on our web site at the bottom left corner, not clean ,but works :)
actually I'm curious about how to get a business-related phone number like this? Does Google Voice do this, but also support round-robin, transcriptions, and webhooks?
You don't need a fancy service for this. Every phone operator supports it out of the box.
Hello HN community,
This is bootstrapped/indie hacker-ish. Would appreciate feedback.
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# What is it
You create a link (e.g. onair/yourname), and anyone can call you from it. Caller uses a web browser to make the call (not dedicated app). You can create as many links as you want, and can direct calls to colleagues in a round-robin or escalation manner.
In a way, it's like the "opposite of Calendly"; whereas Calendly is about meetings in the future, OnAir is about immediate meetings.
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# Motivation behind it
One of our SaaS products was struggling to grow. We believed that if we provide more "hand holding" to visitors on the landing page, it will increase conversion. It's like speaking to the guy behind the counter before making a purchase. That idea/experiment, over time, became OnAir.
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# Feedback
Identifying the perfect use case / customer has not been easy. E-Commerce store owners, which I thought would be ideal customer profile, are not responding as expected (e.g. "why use this instead of a WhatsApp button?"). The value of branded links, round-robin, recording/transcription, lead capture, etc does not seem to matter much to them. Ideas are welcome.
> E-Commerce store owners... are not responding as expected... Ideas are welcome.
What about audience engagement for streamers? my first thought when I saw this was oldschool public access "phone in" shows.
of course, a different usecase demands a different featureset (like, delay, moderation, OBS integration...
Similar to https://rep.ai/ though they have gone down the AI route. Maybe you can investigate how they did their positioning and GTM.
Haha, I've just talked with the author. :) There is a market for crowded cities, I think. When you park your vehicle in front of a crowded place etc you can print/write a link to reach you if needed. There are some anonymity number services, but for internet users, this can be a solution to keep their numbers private. Good luck!
Such a link could be created automatically when you register for a car plate.
Great example of something complex made very simple to the end user. A lot of thought clearly went into the UX. Congrats
Yep. This is a beautiful launch
Thank you! you're so kind.
Looks good, I want to give it a try next week.
Appear.in (now called https://whereby.com/) used to have the same functionality and I would just share my link everywhere so that team members could call me whenever they wanted.
Although, Facetime is kind of the exact same thing isn’t it?
This may come as a surprise to you, but there are plenty of us who don't have Apple devices to use FaceTime with.
OK, I do have a Mac Mini for development purposes, but I don't want to have to drag it out of storage just to make a call.
I did exactly the same product like 4 years ago.
Twilio, voice app etc. But I was so lazy to do a proper marketing and sales.
However I had some ideas that I can share with you if you want:) For free ofc!
Wish you all the luck! Contrast with nice product! Super good!
Jitsi Meet ( https://meet.jit.si ) has been doing this job for me for a few years and I'm pretty happy with it. Easy to self-host too.
Dang! I was about to share this service with my CS and Sales colleagues, but stopped myself when I realized they won’t touch it unless it can be integrated with services like Gong and Salesforce, for call tracking, transcriptions, trainings and archives. I know you have some of these native, but getting a group of people to move to a new app yet again is harder to do than bringing your service to their existing environment.
If theres a way around that, and at min. Leveraging gong for the recording and transcription, do let us know. Nice service! I’ll personally use it in places like email and linked in to try it out.
Absolutely, we'd 100% love to learn more about that and co-design. Could you possibly send us a note on hello@onair.io?
Congrats on launching!
Curious how the dynamic image works in the e-mail signature: AFAIK, Gmail and others heavily cache any images inside e-mail, so even if the image changes, Gmail will be displaying the online/offline cached image, not the most up-to-date one.
You can overcome this using headers, which instructs Gmail not to cache. Snippet:
response.headers["Cache-Control"] = "no-cache, no-store, max-age=0, must-revalidate"
response.headers["Pragma"] = "no-cache"
response.headers["Expires"] = "Fri, 01 Jan 1990 00:00:00 GMT"
You might want to investigate this further - IIRC a lot of email services retrieve images in advance server side to avoid leaking whether the client has interacted with the email. I might be mistaken here.
Looks promising, though it needs a workflow for when potential customers click the link and you show as busy. What then? They aren't going to sit and refresh every 5 minutes waiting for you to get free.
Agreed. For now, you can customize the offline message, such as saying "I'm typically online 12pm-4pm on Mon/Tue", or alternatively, drop a Calendly link or your email.
This might be a silly question: I understand that to talk, the caller uses their web browser with device audio. What does the link creator use?
If the creator has the app (onair.io/ios , onair.io/android), they would receive notifications there and can take the call. Also, if a browser is open when someone calls them, they would also receive notifications there as well.
Is there a way the creator can mark their availability on the app? May be on a calendar?
Yes. You can set yourself `always online`, or `always offline`, or `scheduled`. In the last one, you specify hours in the day (e.g. 9am-5pm), and sync with external calendar (currently Google Calendar) which marks you as offline when you're busy.
Is it built with Ruby? Looks like the landing and login page are.
Should probably consider moving to Elixir, if that's not what you're using on the server already.
What’s is this build on top of? WebRTC connected to something like twilio to make the calls ?
Livekit. Amazing product and community, and has a self-host option. Highly recommended whether you're doing WebRTC or voice agents. First version (pre-launch) was on Agora, their API was a nightmare, highly unrecommended.
Would love for you to try our WebRTC service!
Could have a click to dail link just with a phone number. What are the advantages? Really like it! Taking to conversation to whatsapp would also be cool for small businesses. Emailing both parties an transcript of the conversation could be a nice +1
Someone please explain to me why a phone call is different to this, I'm truly blanking.
I dig this. This is what I am thinking.
Much easier to click than dial.
Social cost of a web link versus a phone number may be lower as well (that may be cultural but it may be true)
Adds other modes like calendar or chat or AI directly in flow.
No need to reveal a phone number.
Video
Internationally accessible (no long distance)
And for HN tradition’s sake for these types of comments, no one likes rsync.
> Much easier to click than dial.
In what way is this easier than click to dial? They’re both one click, but in this scenario I need a headset/microphone, a stable Internet connection, and if I do this from my smart phone it doesn’t know I’m in a call so when I hold the phone up to my face I will likely hit buttons.
This looks good! We do something similar. No links, just a call now button on your wordpress site. https://www.connect-ez.com/click-to-call-service/
A few:
- assign calls to different members (round-robin, escalation)
- capture lead info (name, email, etc)
- don't reveal actual phone number
- recording, transcription
- soon, conversational AI agent (as optional backup)
With a WhatsApp/phone, you can't really switch it from one employee to another easily. Managing load is harder, seeing call logs is harder. And a full call center solution is too much for a small business.
Hide's real phone-number and allows you to control when, how you receive calls. Pretty smart honestly.
I am not sure any of those are really the true value. The driver imo is swapping a chat bubble with an audio call. It reduces friction a customer may have picking up their phone and dialing a number and also since the customer can see you are online and ready to chat, they know they will be able to instantly get in touch with someone. Thats the smart and valuable piece.
Would it be cool that the customer can get notified when there is someone available
> Instantly speak to a sales rep
Soo, if you’re like me, booking a call is a necessity. Most days, half of my day is booked. How do you work around this?
That said, I do like the idea of a uniformed platform with a low barrier of entry when it comes to contacting me.
I just tested this, and they've Google Calendar integration. So you can integrate your calendar and set the link status to Auto, then the link will be online according to your availability.
Very original, I like it! Do you also have the option to schedule a call when either person is not available? Or should you offer your customers to either call you via OnAir, or schedule via (e.g.) Calendly?
Thanks! so, you can add an "offline message" that is displayed when your link is offline. In that case, adding a Calendly link to that message might make sense. Or simply "I'm typically online 12pm-4pm for walk-ins" etc.
Very cool! This seems like a much better solution than Calendly. Instead of capturing leads only to experience a drop-off in conversion to calls, this completely eliminates that issue.
Can I use this for my intercom?
The pricing page is incredibly misleading if not outright illegal.
At the top of the pricing page you show that it's $9 a month to have 10 links and enable round-robin call handling, but looking at the FAQs at the bottom, it's actually $9 a month PER USER:
> OnAir costs as low as $9/user/month. This price is per user, per month. Other pricing plans are displayed on this page. Higher enterprise plans are available starting at $250/month for up to 50 users.
This means that for $9, you actually do NOT get round-robin, since you'd need to pay at least $18 (2 users) to benefit from it.
Similarly the 10 links make it seem like you can have links to reach 10 people, but once again this would in fact cost $90 a month.
Hey. A single user can indeed use round-robin; they can connect multiple devices (up to 3 on a single license Basic Plan). In that sense, a single user can have round-robin among three mobile phones. Having said that, will think more on how to make this more clear.
To make it more clear, perhaps replace "$9/month" with "$9/month/user"? Seems like an easy fix.
> Having said that, will think more on how to make this more clear
You need to think for something you've already done in your FAQ? Change the pricing from $9 / month to $9 / month / user in the main section and stop lying to prospective customers.
I really don’t get this. If I’m a customer looking to call someone, I would rather call, leave a message, and get a call back then have to keep checking over and over to look for a green link that says that a rep is available.
I also don’t want to make a call from my web browser, I’m off on a device without a microphone and headset connected, and if I’m on my smart phone the actual phone capabilities are a lot better in a phone call (I can mute, switch to speakerphone/bt, and hold the phone up to my ear without pressing any buttons on screen).