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Comment by famousactress | Hacker News Reader

I've been keeping an eye on Double and would really love to try this out. I wonder if could help solve an interesting problem... remote employees in companies that are otherwise not really remote.

I'm the only employee at my company not in SF (I'm in San Diego). We've got a fairly remote/asynchronous culture though.. there's one other engineer who works full time from his home even though he lives in SF.. but the culture is slowly shifting as we grow, especially now that we've got a real office :)

I'd be curious to see some case-studies like this one from teams that don't have skin in the game.

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This is exactly the model that my team uses. We have ~40 folks on-site in SF, and about a half-dozen who work remotely. We got a Double a few weeks back, and after a slow start it's now in use most of the time.

The OP is not wrong about the qualitative difference between a 'bot and a normal video-conference setup. Things like this may seem minor (or even silly), but they go a long way to make it feel like our remote colleagues are actually present and part of the team:

https://twitter.com/thedeepg/status/337352680840257536 https://twitter.com/rcoder/status/336584756147916800

That's rad to hear! I can definitely see value in that. It probably only seems minor or silly if you're not the one who's remote. I had to fly back down to San Diego because of an emergency this winter and ended up attending the company holiday get-together via iPad. They propped me up in a chair and hooked a speaker up to me so that my voice had about the same volume as everyone else's. I couldn't believe how well it worked out. Just the short distinction of being at eye-level and not angled up 45 degrees from someone's laptop screen made the experience so much more immersive. The ability to turn my 'head' would be even better :)

Disclosure: Twitter, Inc. is a paying customer of Double.

Thanks Lennon! Would love to get any user-feedback from you too :) jay@doublerobotics.com

I wish we could say we were entirely unbiased! The truth is we do love Double beyond the product itself because the team (David, Marc, Jay and Farhad) is awesome to work with. I mentioned that it was a bit challenging to use the first version we got, but they've iterated on improvements very quickly. (They've also been very patient and collaborative with problems on our side.) We can't wait to see what's coming next.

Hi Phil, thanks for the comment.

Companies are definitely buying this faster than we can make them, and that remote-working use case seems to be #1. I hear ya on case-studies .. stay tuned! :)

- jay@doublerobotics.com

Hi! This is the Market Economics Fairy! If people are buying your product faster than you can make it, it means your prices are currently set too low! There's no point in keeping the price low to stimulate demand when you can't yet increase your supply! Temporarily raise the price until you can gear up manufacturing! That way the people who need your product the most can get it right away! And you can invest more in manufacturing to satisfy more future customers! This will lead to a lovely Pareto optimal outcome with everyone living happily ever after!

(I write this with some reluctance, because this product sounds very cool and useful and yet the prices are probably set too high for the nonprofit I work for - but the more you charge now, the sooner you can scale your volume and lower your prices later, right?)

I dunno. Having seen the price, I've sent around an email to some folk at the office wondering aloud if we should get one. If the price had been twice as high, I wouldn't, and next time someone mentioned it, I'd have remembered it was too expensive ... even if the price had slipped back down due to market forces in the interim.

Is avoiding your reluctance to check the price next time worth $1,000 to them?

Maybe not. People are not that rational when it comes to the cost of something - we have an internal gauge of what is "fair", and violating that can be dangerous. Using an elastic price like this could kill their market before it's established. People are not rational - very few companies do this with their products, even ones that they can't keep on the shelves.

Understanding that if you're selling them faster than making them, generating new interest isn't your highest priority. That said, if that changes I think it'd be awesome to have some kind of loaner program. At our shop we'd be hesitant to plunk down the coin to buy one site unseen, but I could definitely see borrowing (or renting) one for a week or two to get a better understanding of what kind of value it creates for us first-hand.

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