Switchboard - Work side-by-side, even when you’re not in the same room

Hey, Product Hunt community! I’m Amir, founder of Switchboard. Thanks for the hunt, @chrismessina. We're just coming out of stealth after two years of development and are *super* excited to share Switchboard with you and hear what you think. 🎸 But first, a quick story. I picked up a new hobby before the pandemic – guitar. In-person? Fantastic. Virtually? It wasn’t the same. My teacher and I could never manage to start our metronome at the same time and we struggled seeing each other, our guitars, and our sheet music simultaneously. Those lessons were the catalyst for the product we are launching into beta today: Switchboard, a cloud coworking space. We power remote work by bringing together teams and tools for side-by-side collaboration. ⛅️ What’s a cloud coworking space? It’s a collaboration tool designed for remote work: part cloud browsers, part conference room, part video call. Our team has been dogfooding our product daily. We’re a fully remote company and we no longer use Zoom or Google Meet. But this didn’t happen overnight. We talked to hundreds of people about how remote work could be better. We built Switchboard based on these shared beliefs: 👆 Everyone deserves a voice (and a cursor). Other “collaboration” platforms require us to be hosts or participants. We can see and hear each other, but it’s hard to actually do things together. So we developed cloud browsers. They’re fast, secure, and because they live in the cloud, that means you don’t have to share your screen to see apps, images, or PDFs. Instead, you work side-by-side with your coworkers in multiplayer browsers. It’s more like sitting on the same side of the table – collaborating, not just communicating. 🔌 Every app must work without an integration. You know what tools work best for you and your team. That's why we created shared browsers that support every web-based app. Whether you use Notion or Coda, Trello or Monday, Figma or Canva, all apps work in Switchboard. And you can work in apps next to each other within a Switchboard room. 🕰 Reinventing the wheel for every meeting wastes time. It should be easy to start from where you left off in every meeting, without scrambling to find the right Chrome tab and your notes. Our rooms have what we’ve been calling “meeting memory.” Content is saved in rooms so it’s there when you need it. 🔒 Rooms should be easy to access but also secure. No one wants to download another app. Entering a room needs to be fast and intuitive. But we also need to make sure we know who has keys to the office, so to speak. Switchboard is web-based, meaning all you need is a browser. We’ve set up guest and member settings to control room access. We’re also SOC 2 compliant, meaning we work in your best interest to keep your information safe. 💊 We need a pain killer, not another vitamin. There are so many collaboration tools coming out of the woodwork. Our tool needs to be much better, not just a little better. We can’t imagine going back to getting work done over video calls. Now it’s time to see if you think so too. Try Switchboard for your next meeting and let us know what we got right and what we got wrong. Sign up today and get full access for free through the end of 2022. 👋 Come visit us here and say hello @ 11 am PT: https://www.twitch.tv/getswitchb...

It's been a while since I've been so stoked about a gamechanger like Switchboard. You really have to try it to understand how it completely rewrites your expectation of digital collaboration. It's no longer "screen sharing"... it's literally "screen coworking" — where everyone in the virtual room can directly interact with everyone else's browsers and apps. No joke, your mind is going to be blown. 🤯

VP of Eng @ Switchboard here. Thank you Product Hunt for the support! At Switchboard, we’re hiring a fully remote team, and have to walk the walk when it comes to both remote culture and tools to enable seamless remote collaboration. We’re still learning best best practices, but having Switchboard as the tool where we run collaborative meetings, 1-1s, or brainstorming sessions has been game changing. Not only can we learn from the experiences of our customers, but by building a product that we heavily dogfood, we can learn how to optimize our own experience and incorporate those learnings into Switchboard. One of my favorite ways to use Switchboard is our weekly on-call handoff meeting. In this meeting we test and tweak our PagerDuty schedule, look up DataDog logs from incidents, look up tickets in Linear, our issue tracker, follow an agenda, and sometimes look up product analytics in Amplitude. These 4 or 5 web apps live in our weekly On-call Handoff room and we can jump in and immediately start the handoff. While one engineer is looking up logs and tickets from the incidents, the others can tweak the schedule. When one is ready to present, they just hit a button, and all other engineers begin to follow. It makes collaboration really easy, and eliminates the 5 minute prep before the meeting to open all the necessary tabs and screenshare. It also allows for seamless transitions between engineers, particularly if they are solving a problem together. I find this meeting to be more efficient run remotely than in person now, thanks to being able to work together in the tools we already use within Switchboard. This is just one example of a meeting that works better using Switchboard. I'm happy to answer any questions about the product, use cases, our own experience with the product, or our experience building a remote team.

I've had the wonderful opportunity of designing this product along the Switchboard team. As a designer, having had to design a solution which has never before been created had its own challenges, but I could not be more proud of the work which has been bought to life. 👏 My favourite use of Switchboard has been the ability to use Figma within Switchboard for our design reviews. No more asking "Do you see my screen", sharing of the links or an agenda. Everything is located within our design room and the team can access it anytime and check out upcoming features we're working on. 👩‍🎨

Hello world! We're excited to share what we've been working on with the Product Hunt community. Let us know what you think! I first met Amir when Switchboard was a rough mockup that he had made in Figma (yes, Amir uses Figma!). The concept was compelling: a shared canvas for working together using first-class docs and apps, with video chat just another app — unlike Zoom or Google Meet where video is first and screensharing in other content feels like a bolted-on “hack” of a feature. The vision felt right to me; the potential usefulness was immediately obvious. I was intrigued because some of my colleagues didn't think the technology was feasible. But Amir was technical enough to understand what would violate the laws of physics and what wouldn't, and it was clear to me that Switchboard wasn't going to violate the laws of physics. It's been a long journey and lots of work from many talented people since then, but I have to say that Switchboard almost feels "boring" to use now ;) --- it just seems so obvious that this is the product we want for working together remotely as a team. Now, when we're forced to work with others using legacy tools like Zoom and Meet, we want to be back in a Switchboard room again. And Switchboard is the closest experience I've had to the Before Times when I worked in a physical conference room with my colleagues in person. I hope you find Switchboard as useful as we do. Give it a try and send us your feedback on how to improve it!

I see this as a gamechanger for teams who have remote employees. Switchboard really gives you a sense of feeling connected, which is one of the biggest challenges in a post-pandemic work reality we live in. I'm excited to see the future of the product and see where you take it! @iacono, @daniel_shteremberg, @theogravity, @vboughner, and the rest of the team Congrats!

I'm excited about this! Do you see Switchboard as a complement to Zoom or as a replacement? If complement, when would I best use one over the other?

Hey everyone! I've been working at Switchboard for the past year+ and am happy to answer any of your questions! As for me, I’m a visual, hands-on thinker which makes remote work challenging. I am so old school that I still write things down in a notebook because the act of writing creates muscle memory (and a paper trail!). When I met Amir and learned about his vision for Switchboard, however, everything clicked. Seeing content side-by-side, being able to write/click/scroll alongside other people, having the ability to add things in the moment rather than one person sharing at a time – it helps me work the way my mind works. As a marketer, it’s less about the technology and more about what it can unlock: ideas, creativity, camaraderie. Tell us how you’re thinking of using Switchboard with your team and how we can make it better. Feedback is a gift!

We've shifted nearly all our meetings to Switchboard it's been a game changer for productivity and collaboration.

As soon as I saw an early demo of Switchboard, I knew I had to get involved. It totally changes remote collaboration. Seeing multiple browsers, docs, and screenshares, all on the same canvas, with the ability for everyone to interact with them was mind-blowing. It's everything I had wished for as a remote worker during the "Zoom and gloom" of the pandemic. I'm super jazzed to be part of this team and working on this product, and to show it to the world to get everyone using it. I think remote work is here to stay, and Swtichboard is so clearly the next step in how to do it.