Coffee Chats

Hi Product Hunters! After a year of solo-building this project in my free time, I’m excited to finally share Coffee Chats with you all! In June 2020, I launched Coffee Chats to help people connect over virtual coffee chats during COVID. Over the past year, I’ve evolved Coffee Chats based on feedback, and today, I’m excited to finally share Coffee Chats (https://www.trycoffeechats.com) with PH: a no-code platform that lets you build a website that connects with your Google Calendar so you can easily host free or paid virtual coffee chats, meetings, consulting calls, etc. without writing any code (think Calendly meets Carrd in one app starting at $0/mo). Why Coffee Chats? Two coffee chats fundamentally changed my life. - One was catching up with a friend in 2012 and asking her if she could bring a mutual friend out for drinks the next day. I had a crush on that mutual friend for years, and surprisingly, she showed up for drinks. Fast forward a year later, we were dating. Fast forward, 6 years later, and we were married. Fast forward to today, and we're expecting our son in just a few weeks! - The other was also in 2012 with a coworker who I didn't really work with, but we shared similar interests. Through monthly coffee chats, we became good friends always pushing each other to do more to help the world. In 2019, he helped me get my job at Google, but in 2020, he passed away. Though I miss him every day, I'm eternally grateful for the wisdom he shared over our cups of coffee. So with those two coffee chats in mind, I've been personally blessed and understand how a simple coffee chat can change your life. Then, COVID hit. Everyone went inside, and in-person coffee chats vanished. And I was sitting at home one weekend watching the world change, and I decided to build an MVP of a virtual coffee chat platform, and Coffee Chats was born. How does it work? 🖥 Build a website: Sign in with Google to start building your website. A Gmail account is required because Coffee Chats connects with your GCal to show when you’re free on the calendar that’s built into your site. 💅 Personalize your site with the no-code editor: Coffee Chats has an easy-to-use no-code editor that allows you to customize text, links, colors, and fonts on your site. If you want to add custom HTML/CSS, you can upgrade to Premium (more on that below). 💰 Connect with Stripe (optional): If you want to charge for chats, connect your site with Stripe. If you already have a Stripe account, just login with your existing Stripe login and you’re set. After this is complete, set your rate and you can start receiving money for your chats. This is great if you want to turn your chats into a side hustle or you want to use the funds to donate to passion projects and/or charities that you support. 👋 Share your new website: With your site set up, share your new site with your friends, network, mentees, followers, and/or clients. They can book time with you using your site and you can say goodbye to all the back-and-forth emails. It's completely free to create a site with Coffee Chats and you’ll get your own SSL’d website (e.g. .trycoffeechats.com). If you want to add your own custom domain or waive the 5% transaction fee for paid chats, you can upgrade to Premium for starting at just $8/mo with the ability to cancel any time. Lastly, I just want to say that building Coffee Chats over the past year has felt like finishing my self-created programming course because, as someone who started teaching himself to code in 2016 with cheap online classes and Michael Hartl's Ruby on Rails book, I never would have thought I could build a website as a service product that supports a wildcard SSL's domains for the free tier, custom domain using the Heroku API for premium, the Stripe API to handle subscriptions and charging for chats, the Shopify Liquid engine to create the no-code website editor, and the Google Cal API to handle creating and scheduling events. And though I wrote the majority of the code base on my own, this would not be possible without the engineering mentors who helped me along the way so a huge thanks to Shane, Cam, Sami, Julian, and Eli. If you made it this far, thanks for reading my story, and I appreciate any feedback on Coffee Chats! Also, if you’d ever like to have a coffee chat time with me, you can use this link with a promo code applied on my site which will waive the $10 charge for the first 10 people use it: https://chris.trycoffeechats.com...

@chptung Congratulations on the launch! So amazing to see the simplicity of it. Website, payment integration, and scheduling, all at one place!!! I couldn't have asked for more :) I vibe with the ~Edinburgh~ template. So cool 😍

Seems pretty cool, will check it out!

I've used Coffee Chats and loved how simple it was compared to other tools!

wow this is really very easy to use

very cool, good luck with your product

Cool baby, definitely!