Spent $25,000 Adding Video
Hello Hacker Fam,
I have something exciting to show you... Kinda...
In December of last year I acquired Median off of MicroAcquire.
Median is basically Screen Share for your support team. You can add Zoom quality Screen Share to your app or website.
The issue is/was, there was no video feature...
That meant you had to use one of our chat integrations to communicate.
Communicating via chat during a screen share will make you suicidal.
So I contracted Toptal and hired a developer to add Voice and Video...
It ended up costing me $25,000 over 3 months.
[Real quick, that is an EPIC SHIT TON of money for me]
The result is kind of Insane!
We now have the ability to talk to our customers through our website with full voice and video without any installs or downloads.
It's both INSANE and CREEPY! See below image.
I said Kinda above because I am having trouble moving it from staging to production.
So it works GREAT on our site but I can't sell it... yet...
Hopefully people will buy it when it does move into production. Haha
I made the rookie mistake of building this feature without any pre-sales or even 1 person asking for it 😬
As I am typing this I should probably be working on a landing page...
Anyways, if you have any questions fire them over in the comments below.
I believe you overpayed BIG time. This should not have cost more than $5K, and that's an overstretch.
Agree with John. Not sure how it ended up costing 25k
I agree with you. This is one of those situations where I needed a Dev to knock it out and could not find anyone capable of doing the project... So I turned to Toptal...
I will NEVER use Toptal again. I learned after the project that they take 60% plus percent of the revenue and offer ZERO value outside of sourcing the talent.
So of that $25,000 less than $10,000 went to the dev and $15,000 went to Toptal 🤯
Toptal is great IF you have no clue how to source dev talent. If you know how to source dev work then RUN!!!
I just looked at what they actually take, as opposed as to what goes to the customer. It seems that they take an avg of $80/ hour -- which is quite a lot.
But the developer you hired - from what you payed, I don't think he was really that great -- in fact either he's a really bad programmer, or he lied about the hours, or both.
@johnt2021 what makes you say that?
It's an insane amount to pay just to add video+sound to your website.
@johnt2021 to be clear, it is soo much more than video and sound.
It is full 2 way video and audio live streaming through the website.
You can talk to your visitors on your site. I have only seen this done by 1 other company.
Maybe I'm not seeing the full picture here, but this seems like a 1-2 week project to me. It's been a while since I've done JS (since my app is C#), but still, using some JS libs out there, I believe this is not that complicated.
If I had some time, I could actually investigate, because this seems like something cool to do, but I definitely don't (have time) 😁
LATER EDIT: You kinda' made me curious, so I'm actually interested to see the JS code - I couldn't figure out from your website. Do you have a link?
The code just for the the video? or all of it?
About tokbox API - my point exactly. setting that up is a few hours of code , worst case scenario. It's probably 2 days of code to do it all, if you're lazy.
Well... shit...
The code for the video + audio
We used TokBox APIs.
I think this could have potential but it will rather be niche specific. Definitely not for a cheap ecommerce product page. (Because of scalability terms, is probably not worth to have person spend too much time talking with a client of a cheap product.)
But if you for example offered it to Real Estate Companies, where the people watching a listing could directly talk with the realtor while watching the page, then it could be an useful tool.
What have you thought the main use for it would be?
It's a customer success and support tool. Most people don't pop onto a screen share until a customer asks for help via chat, email, phone, etc.
Do you have a specific niche that you are planning to pitch this for?
Not really, right now I am going after companies that are using chat tools.
Do you have any ideas?
I like the real estate space, but an agent has to be watching almost 24/7.
Yea, that's my main "concern" like, if, let's say spoons.com (just as a random example name) decided to use it in their ecommerce shop, their customer support people would have to be on camera, and I feel like this can bring even more friction since a lot of those people won't want to be on camera.
So, the reason why I had the idea of real estate was that the person interested in x property would talk to the actual person that would guide them throught the sale of the property. But yea, that would also mean that the agent would have to be paying attention to it all the time, and in those cases maybe booking a call would be better for them.
Definitely has potential, but it can be tricky.
I would definitely aim for companies that deal with higher priced products. (but that's just imo)
Exactly, we kill it with call centers who already have teams in place.