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by bsirkia 1994 days ago
Been building https://zoomingle.com over the last few months, it's a group video chat service that automatically creates randomized breakout rooms to facilitate 1:1's and other small group chats within a larger group. Came up with it because happy hours during Covid had no side conversations, spontaneous chats, etc. and figured that's the whole point. It's somewhat do-able with Zoom's breakout rooms, but if you have a company of 60 people and what people to be able to chat in random groups of 3 for 5 minutes for an hour, the person manually creating all these breakout rooms would go insane.

I'd like to continue running the tech/product side, but looking for a CEO/co-founder to run the biz dev, strategy, marketing etc.

I'm Brian, a 30 y/o Canadian living in NYC (but totally happy to work with someone remotely, ofc). I've co-founded and ran the engineering teams of two other tech startups, and currently doing misc tech consulting and freelancing.
1 comments
thaufeki 1994 days ago
Think this is a great idea, quick q:

is this an entirely separate platform, or an integration to Zoom?

I think everyone has experienced the awkwardness of being in a company "party" this season, say one word and you're put in center stage for 60 people, really discourages participation.

I wonder how "natural" you could make the mingle, like if you're in one group and see three people chatting in another bubble (I'm envisioning a panel with all sub-groups in separate bubbles), can you move over non-chalantly? (Don't know why this came to mind immediately, I'm just imagining being trapped in a conversation at a party being 10X worse if there's no way to leave the bubble without everyone immediately noticing lol)

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bsirkia 1994 days ago
Right now an entirely separate platform, but the original idea was an integration with Zoom. Unfortunately their API doesn't support breakout room management yet (https://devforum.zoom.us/t/breakout-rooms-api/4255/111) so the idea was to build it entirely separately, get some validation/learnings, and then integrate with Zoom when ready.

In terms of mingle-naturalness, right now it's set so the organizer just says how big the mingles should be and how long they should last. So from a user's side, you're in a group with two random people (from the company/larger group) for 5 minutes, then cycle into a new mingle with two other random people, rinse and repeat. Somewhat like speed dating, you don't have any say over who you're mingling with, but it is time constricted.

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