Show HN: Remotion – quick video chat for remote teams, via desktop selfies

Hey HN, cofounder Alexander here. Seeing Remotion in action is the best way to grok it so you have 3 mins, check out https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eJ0GITPcMAY.

Backstory & problem: Charley and I started working remotely when he moved to Chicago. Immediately our work felt slower. The async-first remote work best practices espoused by larger companies—GitLab & co—didn’t work for us. Frankly we think they’re better for getting many people to execute known work well together, but if you want energy & creativity on a smaller team, you need more face to face chats.

Remotion helps teams quickly chat over video. Unlike most of the space, we aren’t innovating on the in-meeting experience—keeping that lightweight. Instead, we’re innovating on _how_ you start video chats.

Remotion puts selfies of your team on your desktop so you can see who’s free and jump into quick video chats. Hope it’s useful for you all. Looking forward to feedback.

Hey Everyone! Founder here. Remotion is a native macOS (not electron!) app that allows teams to get into quick video chats with their team. The app shows team selfies in the foreground, so that you can feel connected with your team and get into quick chats without leaving your work!

I first built this product with my cofounder, aejae, when I moved away from the SF Bay and found that we weren't collaborating as closely with each other. I hope hn finds our product as exciting as we do!

Feel free to shoot questions about our product!

Love the more presence-oriented take on video conferencing. Co-workers and I have often joked it'd be great to have a traffic light type signal above our workstations at work to know whether it was ok to initiate convo, and Remotion basically has that. Lower friction to have happenstance conversations if you want them, and an easy signal when you don't.

One of the teams I know well has been using Remotion for a while. From the team:

> As a remote team I want to still feel connected in real time to my colleagues. I had thought about just having everyone join a Zoom meeting every day with audio off. But video on all the time is actually pretty invasive for some people, and the tool will only work if everyone adopts it. So they’ve struck a nice balance with the selfies and the ability to pull people into little video chats. It replicates the feeling of presence, without being too invasive.

Congrats on the launch. Really excited to start using Remotion with my team. Folks have been considering switching from Slack to Discord to have a better sense for who’s available for a synchronous voice/video chat, but this is a much lighter and better way of solving that problem without changing our workflow.

I've been helping the team in the run up to launch and I've loved using Remotion. It removes all the friction of quick calls which has significantly accelerated the pace of collaboration.

If your team is all on Mac and remote, I highly recommend trying it out.

Looks pretty cool. The friction of scheduling and joining remote calls is underrated.

I wonder what size teams this product works best for? Presumably seeing 45 faces on the sidebar would get a bit much...

One of the Remotion developers here! Our goal is to create a great experience for remote work. We are open to hear any suggestions or feedback you might have. Please let us know!

Tried this out and love it. Waiting for Linux support so that everyone on my team can use it.