Show HN: Water Cooler – Always-available chat for teams

rpg3 | 57 points

Hi HN!

I'm Ricky, the founder of Water Cooler. I built Water Cooler to help bridge the gap between async written communication (Slack, email, etc) and live meetings.

As many companies suddenly shifted to remote work, I noticed a growing trend of leaving a Zoom meeting on in the background all day. In other cases, teams are scheduling constant back to back meetings. The reason for this is because teams suddenly needed to find a way to recreate the more informal, spontaneous conversation that you normally get from people being in the same physical location. The issue with this is they were using software designed for meetings to recreate something that happens almost exclusively outside of meetings.

The hope is that Water Cooler's always available rooms will offer distributed teams a more natural way to communicate. And all are voice only by default, so there's less of a draw to stare at our app all day (we want people to work, not stare at Water Cooler non-stop).

A bit about our security in light of everything happening with Zoom: All voice and video data is transmitted via WebRTC and is encrypted on the wire. We use Janus for our SFU (https://janus.conf.meetecho.com/index.html) which is open source and plan on enabling end to end encryption (for everyone, not just the paid users) later this year/early next year via insertable streams. Obviously, we'll be limited to offering this in our desktop app and newer versions of Chrome for the time being, but hopefully that won't be the case for long.

We opened up Water Cooler to anyone without an invite two weeks ago and currently have about 35 teams using it. Would love to know what you guys think!

rpg3 | 4 years ago

First there were cubicles. Engineers could concentrate and get work done. They took a break by choice. The open office destroyed the productivity. One person speaks/gets up/chats with neighbor and everyone is distracted. You have to actively ignore your visual and aural inputs(maybe even smells). Remote work fixed it. You could now focus on your stuff and not worry about constant interrupts to your senses. Along comes water cooler to destroy that. You could say “don’t go the always on room if you don’t want to”. But the fact that it’s there, is distraction. “What is everyone talking about that I might be missing?”

dpenguin | 4 years ago

Love the website, it looks absolutely fantastic. I thought it communicated the main points excellently, and I was glad to get to see some screenshots of the app in action too. I definitely want to sign up now. Always available rooms are a very cool idea, something a lot of teams will love! Congrats on launching!

silvi9 | 4 years ago

Now if only we could add the shitty office snacks and bitter as hell coffee, it would be just like normal

purplezooey | 4 years ago

Great idea! The design is a little too "inspired" by Slack though. I would strongly recommend adding at least basic video capability in the free version, since I don't think most people (including me) are going to want to pay without even trying it out.

paxys | 4 years ago

Sqwiggle is an ancestor to this started by Michael Gutman and Matt Boyd c.2012-2013. Some teams at IBM used it. But it freaked people out because it would auto-take a snapshot via your webcam to recreate presence. I thought it was great, but everyone else thought it was creepy. https://web.archive.org/web/20150316035657/https://www.sqwig...

redasadki | 4 years ago

Looks great. On mobile now but will try it on desktop later. Is the pricing really sustainable though? Seems incredibly cheap for something that’ll be sucking up bandwidth and CPU for 8+ hrs/day.

programmarchy | 4 years ago

Great concept and looks like some great execution on designing for a professional environment.

What would you say are the advantages of Water Cooler over Discord?

wilbo | 4 years ago

My very first worry about these things is privacy. Surely work stuff shouldn't be discussed in there but given that E2E isn't mentioned what are the privacy guarantees compared to e.g. Zoom?

If no encryption is present then why wouldn't I use Discord which also has features like screen sharing?

Congrats on launch!

outime | 4 years ago

I think ironically I’d be more shy to use this than a physical ping pong room. Not sure why though, but I think it’s the lack of a real life space and lack of an agenda combined. Maybe I’d get use to it.

quickthrower2 | 4 years ago

Looks great! If I've to incorporate this, would the workflow become Slack + Zoom + Water Cooler? Or would this replace any of Slack/Zoom?

alphagrep12345 | 4 years ago

Interesting. The concept looks like Tandem. Also, I'm working on your app for the individual use cases. remotehour.com

shyamady | 4 years ago

Looks cool! Congrats on the launch!

sawyer29 | 4 years ago

We are currently using pragli which is free and does the job well enough

d0100 | 4 years ago

Congrats on launch!

cvaidya1986 | 4 years ago