People are so desperate to find viable business ideas. We discuss to death MVPs, fake landing pages, articles describing how to find and validate ideas and find first customers.
Yet, no one notices when business opportunity stares them in the face.
Go and duplicate screenhero. It's not that hard (Screenhero was written by 4 devs and 1 designer). They did YC in winter 2013 and got acquired by Slack in Jan 20015, so it's less than 2 years.
You have a validated product that many people love and are willing to pay for and enough of a "outside of Slack" market to sustain a small company.
On launch you'll get free PR just by announcing "Screenhero alternative".
And if you do a good job, it's likely that Atlassian (or some other Slack competitor) will want to acquire you for a tidy sum.
Lot's of the hard code has been written for you (libraries for stun firewall traversal, vp8 for the video codec). You need to write a simple backend for matching people and 2 desktop apps (mac and windows).
It's not easy but it's also not a problem that requires breaking new ground, just solid engineering.
What we get instead are pleas to Slack to not kill stand-alone Screenhero and bemoaning that someone didn't write OSS (aka free) clone.
You mean you could make a YouTube clone in a weekend? It's easy to fall into this way of thinking. But hey, maybe you will build the next Screenhero, or TeamViewer. Or maybe you'll end up as one of the thousands of other versions of this nobody has ever heard of. The idea is usually not the hard part.
I mean that you can make a Screenhero clone in approximately the same amount of time that it took to write it originally. Should be a bit less because straight path (cloning) is shorter than twisty one (things that Screenhero did that did not end up in the final product).
Note that by the time of Slack acquisition Screenhero was approaching v2.0, they had product out far longer than that. So it's not unreasonable to say you could do a v1 of similar product in a year.
Both idea and execution are hard. Cloning existing idea removes one hard part, therefore increasing the chances of success. Look at Excel, Word or Baidu or Sina Weibo.
As to "thousands of other versions of this": you would have to point to at least one. It's hard to argue against imaginary products.
Based on this thread for many people Screenhero has no acceptable substitute.
I can agree that when you have clearly defined business goals its easier to spit out a product. And I'm not arguing that you could make something similar to Screenhero in a year -- the hard part would be to distinguish it from the thousands of others. You could find examples with some Googling (remote desktop software, screen sharing software): GoToMeeting, Join.me, LogMeIn/Hamachi, RealVNC, not to mention built in RDC in Windows, etc. Those are just the famous/obvious ones. If you kept digging, I'm sure you could easily find hundreds if not thousands of similar solutions.
I understand they're slightly different from one another, and I suppose its possible all the commenters here went through each and every one of these options and found nothing useable but it seems unlikely to me, and similarly unlikely the +1 one would make in this pool would be any sort of revolutionary "game changer" VCs would mob onto. The space seems well-established or dare I say it "saturated".
No, but you can probably build YouTube in two years. (Yes, including their global CDN.)
Also, “exact replacement for killed product” is a realy good advertising pitch to differentiate from those thousand other versions. It worked for The Old Reader, and later Feedly, when Google Reader was killed.
If you made $5 million but nobody would ever know about it, or who you are, would you make a YouTube clone?
You're right that the idea is the easy part. Still, there are a number of TeamViewer clones, ranging from terrible to pretty good. They may not have the same brand recognition but TeamViewer is quite expensive and not everyone is willing to pay top dollar.
Sadly this is not true. There are so many excellent applications and SaaS - but they die very fast.
If the company which builds an excellent solution does not get acquired they will learn the meaning of the word "hell on earth": customer acquisition baby. Customer acquisition is not easy.
Of course, customer acquisition is easier if your product does not suck - but not so much.
Screenhero clearly has customers. See all the people on this thread that are sad that Screenhero is going away. You could get your first 10 customers just by contacting those people.
I'm not disputing that customer acquisition is hard but that's exactly why cloning Screenhero is better than doing any random idea.
Also, you would have to list a couple of those "excellent applications that die very fast" before I just take your word for it. Personally I see many not so great applications that do decent business and have never seen an excellent application that died.
> have never seen an excellent application that died
Really? Lots of companies with better/faster/cheaper products go under... I feel like most do. Very few products are so good that they sell themselves.
Yet Screenhero had been at it for 4 years at least, presumably had ongoing guidance from and access to the great business minds at YC and yet in the end decided that the best value they could get for their product was as a feature of Slack.
A friend and I were fed up with the situation a while ago and started work on something that should fit your expectations. I expect it should be available very early 2018.
I wish this was forked instead of killed. Everytime I use Screenhero, it has been butter smooth.
I would be ready to pay $3/month for screenhero standalone or a pay-per-use. I'm not interested in Slack, the use cases are clearly different.
I think Slack missed or rather killed an opportunity here, they could have kept Screenhero (and use it to upsell Slack) and also integrated it in Slack. Not only that but it took them over 2 years to make this integration and in the meantime Screenhero remained invite-only.
Screenhero was the best way for me to remotely support my parents computers. I know there are a thousand tools out there for this, but Screenhero was so incredibly simple that it beat out everything else.
I've used it for this, but much prefer setting up TeamViewer on their computers with my account so that I can hop on their computers anytime to check on updates, virus scan, etc. without them even needing to be present.
I still need their help with they accidentally disconnect from the internet. I would like to have a conversation with the companies who put an unlabeled physical (or key combo) wifi power switches on laptops intended for home use. It's my first troubleshooting step now when family members on laptops have connection issues.
Have you tried USE Together? Collaborative screen sharing with multiple mouse cursors and simple web browser access. Currently in free beta, we are working hard on Mac support, coming really soon :) http://www.use-together.com
I'd hate to jump on board a replacement only to have MS buy it for a crappy Skype integration. I see it's a free beta now, any word on the monetization plan?
Not yet, USE Together will stay free during the beta, while we are scaling it. Unlike Slack, it doesn't require the users accessing your screen to have any account on our servers.
i wonder if screenhero's smoothness had anything to do with it being stuck in invite-only limbo. when you have tight control on how many people are using your app, you don't really have to solve infrastructure scaling problems yet.
I fail to see the "offense". Maybe the tone in that email is aggravating to you as it seems to be for him, but... I can only shrug and wonder. I'd say it's not a bit worse than half of the promotional emails from services I (or my company) pay for in a week...
I have to +1 this. I use it to communicate with my son, who resisted my efforts to get him to reply to my emails (since youngsters hate email, apparently) or join a family slack.
Sad to say it, but it seems like email is the new fax machine. At least in terms of the younger generation's perception of it as a communications technology.
When they're old enough to work they'll be forced to interact with people who aren't their friends, and then they'll discover a new appreciation for email.
It won't go away all at once, but a scant few years after "they're" old enough to work, their friends will have been as well, and just we don't consider a company without a website to be a "real" company in this modern times, a company without a Signal/Facebook Messenger/Snapchat contact link will be seen as old and antiquated. I will mourn the loss of the federated open system we call email, and perhaps you're right - it may never go away. But the younger generation doesn't stay young forever.
I don't see this happening today and I don't see this happening tomorrow either.
The non-email world is fragmented. Signal? Facebook? Snapchat? Whatsapp? None have achieved ubiquity and their audience is constantly churning over to the next fad platform. Facebook has the best shot and there's still a huge part of the population that doesn't want their FB life to intersect with their work life.
Email is the lowest common denominator. The fact that "younger generations" (as if every 3 years is a "new generation"?) choose a different platform only reinforces the value of email as the only thing that everyone can agree on.
Think of a group text with random emails and etc and it simply raises up a slack with all the parties invited and owned by the creator - then you can choose to dissolve or make perm the slack as needed...
Stand-alone ScreenHero sharing is smooth as butter -- truly amazing. Controlling a remote computer feels local.
Right now I'm using the slack-integrated "ScreenHero", and it's really laggy. This is super disappointing, and painful to use. It's actually making the mouse pointer of the person sharing lag for them.
Slack: please keep the stand-alone ScreenHero until you make the integrated one have the same performance.
> Slack: please keep the stand-alone ScreenHero until you make the integrated one have the same performance.
Given the shitty performance of the Slack desktop client (which basically only does IRC with gifs and emoji), I'm not too confident in their ability to improve the performance of, well, anything.
It's a native desktop client for Slack, Skype, Slack, Facebook, etc. It's only 4 MB, it has minimal CPU usage, and it can handle hundreds of thousands of messages without lag.
Also, given that it's not open source, I can't trust it with my private Slack teams. I would seriously consider making the source open. You can still charge for it (and I'd love to pay for it!), but I need assurance that it's not doing anything untoward. Perhaps a Patreon level that includes source code access?
Having the source but not building it yourself doesn't rule out that the compiled app actually has different source than the code you got. So having the source but having it rely on some complex or irreproducible build system is not enough for open source here.
That's like claiming that World of Warcraft is only 4MB because that's how big the launcher is. It also creates folders in the wrong place[0] (1 directory above %APPDATA%).
Good catch, thanks! Will be fixed in the next release. I'm not good with Windows stuff.
I don't agree with your WOW example. The browser is downloaded only for authentication, it's not used after that. The actual app is indeed 4 MB, and it has minimal CPU/RAM usage, unlike web browsers and WOW :)
Yes, downloading 50 MB for authentication sucks, but you still get a light native app.
> If you currently use Screenhero, you’ll need to migrate your team to Slack before December 1st, 2017. At that point, the stand-alone Screenhero app will no longer work — but you can enjoy the same features in Slack.
Sounds like they already have their plans set in stone.
If anyone from Slack is reading, I'm respectfully asking that they change the sunset date or invest the engineering effort to fix the performance regression before the sunset date.
Perhaps management didn't know how much of a downgrade this was.
Late last year and early this year we used Screenhero daily. It was free, so I didn't expect too much, but my team had various connection issues daily on various OSs and locations. I stopped using it despite it being smooth as butter when it worked (which was 80%+ of the time).
Hopefully Slack's acquisition helps/helped them with those apparent scaling issues.
I tried so hard to make screenhero work for me in 2015. It's smooth when it works, which is sometimes and for an hour at a time. Basic things like keypress replication were so buggy that I consider them unfinished - keyboard events would just be dropped on the wire and be careful not to type too fast or yur cde wll ome out ike thi!
I'm sure it's all fixed now as the Slack experience itself is robust.
Why has "smooth as butter" become such an overly used phrase in the tech world? Listening to the last Apple product release I must have heard the word butter a few dozen times.
I don't know about anyone else but this phrase is really starting to annoy me. It's overly used, and the word "butter" in my mind is closer to "greasy", like "don't touch it with your finger because it'll get slimy and you'll have to wash your hands". Can't you just say "smooth" or "without any perceptible lag"?
"Smooth as butter", "smoother than butter", "butter smooth", et al is a common western phrase. It's as old or older than the King James Bible itself (Psalms 55:21 if you're curious). It's a quintessential English idiom.
there was also a 'Project Butter' designed to make Android 'Buttery Smooth' a few years back - I think the high level of application of this idiom to video rendering specifically took hold at that point..
Really disappointing news, rolling Screenhero into Slack doesn't solve the same problem at all.
I work for myself and have a large contact list of people who don't know each other who I often pair with or screenshare with. With Slack, there's really no way for me to create the same setup.
I'd need to create a new team called "Adam's Screenhero Contacts", invite all of my contacts (who don't know each other) to be part of this "team" together, and I'd have to foot the bill for the whole team since there's no way for each individual to pay for their own Slack account.
Is there a viable Screenhero alternative out there yet?
We use appear.in through our paid Slack accounts. I don't know how our admins set is up but we just type /appear in any channel/chat and immediately get a link.
In the Slack admin panel you can change the default call provider from slack to others, one of those is appear.in. Doing this will cause the “call” button in the slack app to auto generate a unique link for appear.in and add it to the chat. Works well if your company won’t scrape together for paid version of slack (such as mine).
This doesn't solve it either, however. As an example, if I'm friends with 5 people who each have this setup, I'll have to pay to belong to each of their 5 separate shared Slack channels. And they would need to do the same for each of THEIR friends.
GoToMeeting is rock solid if you only need to broadcast a single screen at a time. (Only one "one-to-many" screen; no collaboration, no multiple cursors.) It's low-bandwidth, supports dial-in and recording, and has a native app.
Screenhero is hands down the best (smoothest) screen sharing app I've ever used.
It's bittersweet to see them acquired by Slack as a paid only feature, but I'm happy for the team and it seems like a very ideal kind of acquisition where they solve a problem Slack has and wasn't solving well, and then Slack can scale the Screenhero userbase overnight.
Edit: I just tried this feature in Slack with /call then enabling others to edit and it didn't seem to be as smooth as the usual Screenhero experience. I wonder if something was changed in the integration.
Thanks for making screenhero, it’s been one of my most used applications and I love it. I would have gladly personally paid a monthly subscription for it. But this news makes me very sad. Slack runs like garbage — it’s slow, it has CSS rendering issues (for a desktop app... ugh) every so often, it uses waaay too much RAM (I’ve had it use 4gigs... I’m sorry but chat is never the primary thing I do on my computer, that is not acceptable) — the slack track record when it comes to performance has been pretty bad, so forgive me if I don’t hold my breath. I hope I’m wrong...
Hi there. Thanks for building a truly great product and congrats on the acquisition.
I know your hands are tied to some degree about all this, but I'll make a plea regardless.
We use Screenhero regularly. It is the critical tool for enabling remote collaboration which is a big deal for our distributed teams (all of them).
Our corporate firewall blocks Slack. Plenty of us are upset about that, but it's life for us. As of December 1, we can't use Screenhero anymore and this will be pretty disruptive for us.
We'll find some way to deal, but this is disappointing.
Yea I found the window a bit harder to control as well. I'm also really bummed because I'm not sure how I am going to help my little sister learn to code now that we can't screenhero together. Not gonna make a paid slack channel just for that.
I'm going to mention Jitsi Meet[1] since nobody has mentioned it. 6 months or so ago I started looking for a simple, reliable and cheap option to share a screen. I don't like GoToMeeting because it's too enterprise-y and there are a lot of steps involved—not too friendly for my tastes.
And there are a few like that.
I stumbled upon Screenhero, but it was already too late—Slack bought it and it's not possible to create a new account.
What we chose for a few weeks was Appear.in—a simple, painless and reliable tool. However I feel like it's not polished enough, and some of our clients had issues with it, so I kept looking.
Jitsi has been a blast: just install an extension (or no extension if you're on Firefox) and you're ready to go. It's uncluttered, it's reliable and too good to be free to be honest.
Only downside it's that all the URLs are public and since there are no registration involved, there's no admin on each channel.
I use screenhero daily for work and I am incredibly sad to see it go, even though we all knew this day was coming. It hits even harder for me since my company just moved us off of slack due to their lack of hippa compliance and cost issues, so not only is the standalone screenhero gone, I've lost the ability to use it in slack too. Does anyone have a good suggestion for an alternative?
Many companies claim HIPAA compliance. That doesn't mean much, though, unless they're willing to sign a BAA with their customers. I don't have direct experience with this and our Slack usage, but I'm guessing this is where the disconnect is.
Does anyone know of the “secret” sauce that made screenhero so much better than the alternative.
When I used it years ago, it was super smooth and felt more like the real screen rather than the remote screenshare
I have the same question. Using it a lot, there were little quirks that made it feel like it had very low level access to my Mac. Sometimes it would move the mouse on my screen outside the SH window, but synced up with the other person's mouse (on their 2nd monitor not shared). Especially noticeable with dual screens or when moving the SH window. Kind of hard to explain in words.
We're daily SH users, and the voice chat still feels leaps and bounds ahead of anything else (Slack, Zoom, Chime, etc). Inevitable sunsetting, but sad.
We user both Slack and Screenhero at work. This is not a move I'm looking forward to. Slack's Video/Audio issues are so many that we also still use webex for person to person video chats more often than not. I've been nothing but disappointed every time I've tried to use slack for something that's not text based chatting.
Can someone tell me how screenhero performs in a call of 50+ people? We teach classes, and Slack is our home base, so Screenhero would be great, but I’m not sure of how it scales.
As of 12 months ago, I inevitably had problems with more than 3-4 people in a session. But that was mainly when we'd try to rotate presenters. Got used to restarting the call in order to pass the baton. Even without rotating however, there would often be connectivity issues where someone had to drop off and reconnect. That slowed us down with small groups, so if you had to pause anytime one of 50 people had connectivity issues I'd guess it would be unusable unless they fix the connectivity issues.
Have you tried youtube for live streaming? Never tried a private stream, but they certainly know how to scale video.
I have the same question- I teach a class with 60 students in a lab and like to share my screen so they can follow along if they're in a poor position to view the projector screen. Currently use join.me but it's a little expensive and I'd love tighter Slack integration.
So I suppose that means Screenhero won't be available outside of Slack anymore? I always found it useful as a stand-alone app when you wanted to let somebody control your screen that is not on Slack. Anyone have good alternatives for that?
I use splashtop to remotely access my computers and provide support to my parents. I haven't found anything that competes when it comes to speed. I even use it to remotely work on Photoshop.
This is highly appreciated (as someone who never got an invite to Screenhero, so was never able to compare)!
I hope it's stable. Slack's audio/video conferencing is not exactly... smooth.
In fact, it still boggles my mind that in 2017, conferencing is still in the stone ages when it comes to reliability.
With Slack I often either get a one-way connection (only one party can hear the other) or the call is unable to connect, claiming that "Bob ended the call". Meetings tend to start with five minutes of "Can you hear me? Hello? Testing, testing..." until we either are able to get a connection, or we give up and move to Skype, which isn't perfect, but much more reliable.
Incredibly, it also turns out that if you try calling someone who's already calling you on Slack, you get a busy error! How insane is that? We were both trying to reach each other, both expressing — in terms of UI — the exact same intent, and the app interprets that as a conflict.
There's also some pretty shoddy intergration between the desktop and mobile app. Recently, I tried talking to a colleague, and we went through all of the above insanity, but at one point, as he was calling me, Slack on my phone was ringing, but the desktop app wasn't. Some of these bugs are hard to understand.
My company's go-to solution the last couple of years has been GoToMeeting, which is 99% rock solid, but doesn't integrate well with anything, and doesn't have a good mobile app. The biggest benefits to GTM are the ability to record meetings, and the ability to dial in through a normal phone. The latter feature has saved is a lot of times when one person has been on a bad Internet connection.
Screen hero audio was wonderful for me. It felt as if you were sitting next to the other person, even when the other person was half way around the world. I hope the new functionality in Slack will be comparable.
That shared control and having both mouse pointers visible was really the key value of Screenhero for me. I would love to see something that does this on Linux.
Don't worry I'm sure it will work in 5 or 6 years when they get around to implementing this functionality in some subtly incompatible way on each major desktop environment.
Since its impossible to implement something that works across multiple environments hopefully whichever one does the best job of providing this feature also does a decent job of providing every other feature that previously was able to be provided by any app.
It "works" for me, but my "screen" is virtual - so slack wants to share both monitors as one big screen. So yes, it works, but not for my setup. It isn't useful. Being able to pick which monitor or app to show would make it useful. Being able to share the current app, whatever that is would be awesome.
It has driven me to use google meet - which seems to be more stable and doesn't bog down my system.
For anyone wanting to roll this themselves, it's actually quite easy with Chrome media capture these days. Just make a Chrome extension with desktopCapture permissions, follow the example codes to do things like chooseDesktopMedia and webkitGetUserMedia and let them choose the desktop (or tab). You can do what you want w/ the media stream after that (like capture to blobs which you can send around, or send over WebRTC or whatever).
I have even successfully captured a tab to video [0]
Got my edit in just as you typed this, heh, no it doesn't. But I doubt capturing keyboard and mouse and sending it would be that difficult. Granted at that point I would opt for an OS native approach.
The audio quality of ScreenHero has always been so great. What codec are you using? I think I remember you saying you switched the video codec to H.264. How did you make the audio side work so well?
While this Slack feature is meant for live screensharing, remote teams also need a way to record and share screencasts outside of live meetings. My cofounder and I having faced timezone inflicted pain in remote teams before, wanted to scratch our itch, and built a solution for anyone to easily record and share screencasts. If you feel remote work pain, do check us out at https://checkoutclip.com. Interested to hear thoughts.
Yet, no one notices when business opportunity stares them in the face.
Go and duplicate screenhero. It's not that hard (Screenhero was written by 4 devs and 1 designer). They did YC in winter 2013 and got acquired by Slack in Jan 20015, so it's less than 2 years.
You have a validated product that many people love and are willing to pay for and enough of a "outside of Slack" market to sustain a small company.
On launch you'll get free PR just by announcing "Screenhero alternative".
And if you do a good job, it's likely that Atlassian (or some other Slack competitor) will want to acquire you for a tidy sum.
Lot's of the hard code has been written for you (libraries for stun firewall traversal, vp8 for the video codec). You need to write a simple backend for matching people and 2 desktop apps (mac and windows).
It's not easy but it's also not a problem that requires breaking new ground, just solid engineering.
What we get instead are pleas to Slack to not kill stand-alone Screenhero and bemoaning that someone didn't write OSS (aka free) clone.