WeKiki - 4-person video chat platform where strangers become friends

@bentossell haha, you struck the balance between patience and urging me to post very well, I would say! First, I would say that Blab was a magical product. I am a former Blab user and I, like many others, mourned its eventual demise, even if the writing had been on the wall for a while. I have remained in touch with many of the people I met on Blab, and even met or hosted several of the people I knew only from the Internet. So you might notice that this version of WeKiki looks rather familiar. We kept the 4-person format. There's an active sidebar chat. Many of the people are even the same, haha. But 2 major things separate us even now: 1. We took a different route with the technology, attempting more P2P connections 2. We intend to monetize (because we are bootstrapping!) And in the future we have plans to be very different--our monetization strategy is slotted to be private rooms. We will be offering private DMs. We will open our API to the addition of bots and other customizations. But for now, we're rather retro. Thanks for the question, Ben!

@kikischirr Impressive! Congrats :)

@jpvalery Thank you, JP!

@kikischirr Congrats on launching quickly and on bootstrapping WeKiki - and for the nerve to name it after yourself. I put some time into building a product plan for a "better Blab" myself, and we decided against it. Assessing the competitive landscape for a product whose customers would financially sustain, it looked grim. I wish you success with that. I'm of the belief that people will pay for sex and will pay for a meeting product, if it beats competitors in some ways, but they will not pay to hang out. Find a couple people (or just Jaron) to bounce ideas off - people who are familiar with the competitive landscape and want you to win. The monetization: there's honesty in this. The user knows what you're up to, what you want from him. You are not toying with him just to press his buttons and see what he will do, or collecting data on which videocalls he joins/creates, so as to later build an AI or sell him to advertisers. To be clear, this is why I never trusted the creators of Blab. Coming from years of experience with videocalls, both party-type and meetings, when I encountered Blab, I found just two things that I continue to believe they did well: 1. allowing potentially more people in the videocall page (in the chat) than are in the videocall 2. they initially seeded the community well (as I heard, from Slack communities and Reddit) Unfortunately, they quickly ceased putting any time into seeding the community. Please keep in mind that few people will quit using the site for the inevitable influx of trolls - if there are plenty of worthwhile people to hang with (and especially if they find that it's like every other day that they're meeting someone new and worthwhile.) So please seed this from beyond those who remember you from Blab. tty soon, I'm sure.

@osakasaul Wow, Saul thank you for sharing your insights. Maybe I'll catch you on WeKiki sometime to discuss them further, haha. :) I think seeding the community, as you said, will be vital and one of our biggest challenges--that's something I'd like to discuss with you. Thanks again!

@cheatwoodphoto hahhaha, no teens?--it's a feature! :P To be fair, Cheats, don't we have a few teens?

@kikischirr you can count me as a teen. I'm constantly told to be less child like!

@afhill My big fear regarding private rooms is not that we will appear just like the competition, but that it will kill the urge to make new friends. So we'll have to approach it carefully. I'm considering making the rooms need to be ephemeral also, like the main rooms currently are. What do you think? Would that help?

@kikischirr could help.. and actually, I should apologize, I was being very "feature-focused" there. If your use case is "people come here to have great convos with smart people they don't know yet", it's really a very different problem you're solving than video conferencing. People probably wouldnt see them as competitiors.. but you COULD benefit from "I already use Wekiki to help me find new friends, why would I want to go off and use something else once I've found them?"

@afhill No need to apologize, you had an excellent point--didn't mean to divert the conversation, it's just that this has worried me for a bit. You're very right that the use case for the private premium rooms might not be apparent... Hm.

@kikischirr ya never know - think about all the sub-services that launched private twitter channels, etc. I always felt like blab had more of a chance to compete as a marketing/ brand awareness platform; maybe bring in some analytics, etc. If it could be used for marketers, you'd hit some legit budgets there!

@kunalslab I'm a self proclaimed Wekiki ambassador. Hope to connect with you on Wekiki :)

@kunalslab thank you! See you soon! :)

@angeliqueangiea @kikischirr definitely after this blizzard in Boston! Can't see anything in front of my feet! 🌨 ⛄ 🌬 💨

@brunowinck Par-ty! Par-ty! Par-ty! :D

I love how @kikischirr listens to our early suggestions :D

@angeliqueangiea Angie, I owe you for all the outreach you've done on WeKiki. I will listen to your suggestions any day!

@danny_mcdonald You know, I had never thought of it for quick product focus groups but that does make perfect sense. We should idea-jam sometime, Danny. I'd love your opinion on a few other things, too! Thank you!

@lisadziuba We have a large population of people whose second or third language is English. I think it might be Jane's fifth language. We also have rooms that crop up in Arabic quite often--mostly a very friendly group of Moroccans. So if you're looking to practice Arabic or English, WeKiki is ideal. I'm hoping to gather more languages in time. Great question, thank you!

@kikischirr thanks for answering! I'm just feeling a bit shy, because my English isn't fluent and that might be an issue when talking to strangers. You know, it's very difficult to make jokes in not native language :)

@lisadziuba I can't wait to see you around WeKiki. :)

@mubashariqbal Thank you for the encouragement, Mubs. It means quite a lot from a skilled developer like you! :D