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.
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.
I really like this idea, but not for the listed business use case. I don't imagine many people under 40 are likely to "hop on a quick call" to ask a question about a product that wouldn't already be handled by a standard customer support line.
As a privacy nut, I love the idea of giving people a way to contact me without having to explicitly reveal my contact info. With a service like this, you could embed the call URL on your website, business card, socials, etc. so that you could track which source generated the calls and rotate them as necessary.
Even better if I could control who can contact me at what times. I'm assuming those types of rules could be baked in with IP blocking.
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!
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).
This is super cool. One neat idea: when I'm in offline mode, I can clone my voice, provide some context data/sources, and have my AI clone answer calls for me. It can give me a summary of conversations it had each day and allow me to follow up.
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.
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.
People are weird and sometimes things don't make sense from their existing framing. What if the URL was OnAir.com/555-555-5555 <~ basically make it look like a phone number and make it something where people can see they can text, call, or message. If you're live, it shows that. If you're not live, it gives you a way to leave a message. The interaction is almost exactly the same, but might create less friction of "what is this" by making it feel like how phones and contact points have worked for years.
Did you think to market it to small bricks and mortar shops ? You know, these little companies where customers ask for advises. I work with some of them. They often use one phone only for personal and professional calls. Further, they don't have strict separation between work and family things.
If you could add some automation like detecting when the phone is quickly moving (you are in a car, a train, a bike…), or when the phone is not at the workplace it could help them a lot.
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?
i've been playing around with a similar concept over the last year as well
when i'm at my PC, I keep a google meet on all day. instead of slacking me, coworkers can go to my google meet link (which never changes cus it's a recurring event on my calendar) and talk to me immediately. far better than huddles because there's no "are you available for a huddle" friction. if i'm online, then i'm online and the permission to just come talk to me is implicit.
I also use it for family and friends. my wife, kids, sister and parents can always just go to my meet link if they want to pop in to chat. i've shared it with friends and former coworkers too.
additionally, every day I start a private youtube livestream (and sometimes public) and embed the stream on my website at kenwarner.com/online which is linked with a :large_green_cirle: in the header menu so people can quickly see that i'm online. when people find my website (usually from twitter interactions) sometimes people will join the meet to talk too. much more chill than most (text-based) interactions on twitter. even if the conversation started (on twitter) with some kind of disagreement, people act like human beings again (for the most part) when it's a video chat. it's fun.
i've often thought that it'd be neat if there were a service similar to calendly.com/username like you've done to let people talk/videochat any time. if enough people had such a thing, you could build a social media platform on top of it too. the digital public square today is still mostly text (twitter/threads/bluesky/etc) and the image/video platforms (ig/tiktok/youtube) are all still oriented around a one to many broadcast model. i'm a creator and you're an audience member. with monetization of the audience in mind. omegle was a sort of person to person videochat platform, but it was all random connections. this would be more directed in terms of who you decide to talk to.
hadn't thought of this idea as just targeted at business use cases, but it makes sense. hope y'all get some traction!
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
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
Great example of something complex made very simple to the end user. A lot of thought clearly went into the UX. Congrats
I really like this idea, but not for the listed business use case. I don't imagine many people under 40 are likely to "hop on a quick call" to ask a question about a product that wouldn't already be handled by a standard customer support line.
As a privacy nut, I love the idea of giving people a way to contact me without having to explicitly reveal my contact info. With a service like this, you could embed the call URL on your website, business card, socials, etc. so that you could track which source generated the calls and rotate them as necessary.
Even better if I could control who can contact me at what times. I'm assuming those types of rules could be baked in with IP blocking.
See my Ask HN thread on a related subject - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41035513
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!
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!
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).
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?
> 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...
This is super cool. One neat idea: when I'm in offline mode, I can clone my voice, provide some context data/sources, and have my AI clone answer calls for me. It can give me a summary of conversations it had each day and allow me to follow up.
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.
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.
Very cool. I’ve sent to our CTO.
I’d like to test this out for sales, via the website. As a more frictionless way of capturing inbound interest and fielding questions.
I’d also like to see how we can capture product feedback / issues via our product.
Questions:
- can the link be cnamed so I can use our own domain, rather than ‘OnAir.io’
- are there any docs / demo of how the widget can be customised?
I see your demo. It looks like it also captures the name / email of the customer.
1. That’s a value prop on the sales side, and except for the demo, that wasn’t clear to me.
2. Can we prefill those? (Again wasn’t clear) This would be valuable in the support / feedback use case, as we know who the user is.
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.
People are weird and sometimes things don't make sense from their existing framing. What if the URL was OnAir.com/555-555-5555 <~ basically make it look like a phone number and make it something where people can see they can text, call, or message. If you're live, it shows that. If you're not live, it gives you a way to leave a message. The interaction is almost exactly the same, but might create less friction of "what is this" by making it feel like how phones and contact points have worked for years.
Did you think to market it to small bricks and mortar shops ? You know, these little companies where customers ask for advises. I work with some of them. They often use one phone only for personal and professional calls. Further, they don't have strict separation between work and family things. If you could add some automation like detecting when the phone is quickly moving (you are in a car, a train, a bike…), or when the phone is not at the workplace it could help them a lot.
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?
i've been playing around with a similar concept over the last year as well
when i'm at my PC, I keep a google meet on all day. instead of slacking me, coworkers can go to my google meet link (which never changes cus it's a recurring event on my calendar) and talk to me immediately. far better than huddles because there's no "are you available for a huddle" friction. if i'm online, then i'm online and the permission to just come talk to me is implicit.
I also use it for family and friends. my wife, kids, sister and parents can always just go to my meet link if they want to pop in to chat. i've shared it with friends and former coworkers too.
additionally, every day I start a private youtube livestream (and sometimes public) and embed the stream on my website at kenwarner.com/online which is linked with a :large_green_cirle: in the header menu so people can quickly see that i'm online. when people find my website (usually from twitter interactions) sometimes people will join the meet to talk too. much more chill than most (text-based) interactions on twitter. even if the conversation started (on twitter) with some kind of disagreement, people act like human beings again (for the most part) when it's a video chat. it's fun.
i've often thought that it'd be neat if there were a service similar to calendly.com/username like you've done to let people talk/videochat any time. if enough people had such a thing, you could build a social media platform on top of it too. the digital public square today is still mostly text (twitter/threads/bluesky/etc) and the image/video platforms (ig/tiktok/youtube) are all still oriented around a one to many broadcast model. i'm a creator and you're an audience member. with monetization of the audience in mind. omegle was a sort of person to person videochat platform, but it was all random connections. this would be more directed in terms of who you decide to talk to.
hadn't thought of this idea as just targeted at business use cases, but it makes sense. hope y'all get some traction!
What’s is this build on top of? WebRTC connected to something like twilio to make the calls ?
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.
> 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.
Would it be cool that the customer can get notified when there is someone available
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.
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?
Are you dog fooding your own product?
Can’t find a link to „onair“ you on your website.
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.
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 a clean and simple (to the user) product. Love it.
Also, maybe you need a free tier until you can capture some part of the market from WhatsApp
Can I use this for my intercom?
how does it work?
Similar to https://rep.ai/ though they have gone down the AI route. Maybe you can investigate how they did their positioning and GTM.
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.