AsyncMeets

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  Webapp - Welcome

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  Webapp - Creating an AsyncMeet

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  Webapp - Participating at a AsyncMeet

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  Webapp - The AsyncMeet Challenge

Inspiration

I work in a startup, and we hate long and boring meetings. To prevent those nasty things from happening, we adopted the standup format with a twist; everyone has a fixed amount of time to talk (usually less than 2 minutes) about a discussion topic, and sometimes we add a challenge, like presenting while planking (example (not my company))

Here in Italy, the lockdowns were among the most aggressive in Europe, and because of it, in our company, we had to push all of our in-office work to remote working. Things now are a bit more relaxed, but we learn a lot in the past 2 years and kept doing remote working. But we lost our fun standup meetings, and with all of our employees working on their own time (we had this issue even before Covid with employees in different time zones), we needed to find a way to do effective asynchronous fun meetings and discover there was no solution in the market. We discovered Loom thanks to the hackathon and realize that the most complicated part of this endeavor (video recording and storage) could be easily made with their SDKs.

What it does

AsyncMeets allows an organizer to create an asynchronous meeting by setting a discussion topic, a time limit, a list of participants, and an optional fun challenge (presenting standing up, doing pushups, sharing an interesting fact, and many others). AsynsMeets sends an invitational email to each participant where they receive instructions to record their presentation. When everyone participates, a new email is sent to all with a link to the concluded meet where there is a gallery of all recorded videos.

There is no registration and a clean, simple, and beautiful interface. AsyncMeets is built to be frictionless so is easy to adopt by any company.

How we built it

Using NodeJS for the backend on the AWS services, MongoDB Atlas, Angular for the frontend, and a few spices here and there, and of course the LoomSDK.

Challenges we ran into

None!, As mentioned before, the most complicated part of this idea is the video recording and storing. With the LoomSDK that part is criminally simple! A few lines of code, some hacks here and there to have super custom functionalities and that's it!

What's next for AsyncMeets

Since the only cost right now is the server, and it is very negligible, the idea is to run AsyncMeets for a while to measure if there is a need for it in the market, and if so, analyze if there is space for a premium version that will allow company branding, more participants, templates, and other functionalities.

Made with love in Milan, Italy 🍕

Built With

• loomsdk
• mongodb
• node.js
• sendinblue