Sidekick (YC S20) is a new device that lets teammates work side by side during set coworking sessions. Teams at Coinbase, Brex, and Eventbrite use Sidekick to build strong team relationships while remote.
We have used Sidekick for our remote team all day, everyday for months. It's an easy way to feel a sense of presence, connectedness, and camaraderie with our team.
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Sidekick literally brought me back into the "hacker house" with my co-founders (digitally), allowing us to constantly communicate and always stay in sync with ease. I probably have ~10 short conversations a day using Sidekick, and it is, by far, the most effective tool I've used to keep our founder communication going strong. Awesome product, awesome team behind it.
Thank you so much, Sidekick team!
Sidekick is by far the easiest and fastest way to get a hold of someone - just tap and chat! We use it to easily communicate between us (the founders) and it really helps us feel like we're "together" even in a remote world! :)
Love it! 🙌
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We've been using Sidekick for many months now and it has been the most important remote work tool we've tried by far. We're a small team where pre-remote work all you had to do was spin your chair around in the office to speak with someone so going full remote was very challenging for us at first. There was enough of a hurdle to message someone on Slack, post a meeting link and wait for them to join that we found we weren't having the short, "I just had an idea", or "could you help me really quick so I don't spend an hour trying to figure this out myself" conversations we used to have which really started scaring us so we gave Sidekick a try and haven't felt the need to look for any other remote work tools since.
@rrhoover Thanks for the feedback!
From interviewing teams that tried the hacked together Zoom on an iPad solution, it's really hard to consistently get the team in the room. Users are constantly leaving the room for external meetings and it's unclear when anyone's going to come back. Very quickly, the solution becomes useless because nobody's in the room and it's unclear when anyone will join.
Sidekick productizes this culture of joining and staying in the room. Unlike Zoom on a tablet, it treats "always-on" as a first-class problem to solve. Some examples of product decisions we've made are:
* Push notifications to minimize being alone in the room - when someone joins as the first person in the room, we send a notification to the rest of the team. We want to get other teammates in the room ASAP because the room is only useful with more than one person.
* Meeting mode - when you have a normal Zoom meeting with someone outside of your team, you can mark yourself as "in a meeting". This silences the mic and speakers on Sidekick while also setting a status informing your team that you're in a meeting. We're also releasing Google Calendar integration soon, allowing Sidekick to automatically mark itself as "in a meeting"
On average our users are in their Sidekick rooms for 6 hours a day. They turn it on first thing when they sit down in the morning and leave it on throughout all their meetings during the day.
@rrhoover The details have made a big difference. We tried using iPads and such and it didn't stick -- hard to set up, surprisingly; wrong UI for the persistently-on use case, video consistency was hard with drops, etc. And now... this just works.
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great product! I use the sidekick for ~14 hours a day!
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