room.sh — a better way to Meeting.

I hate meetings.

Meetings are the same all around the world. Set time, set duration, too many people, unnecessary chatter, time wasting and often without clear objectives.

Your team spends more than 15% of its time in meetings, and three-quarters of your employees think they’re a waste of time. (src)

But meetings are so important.

The higher the decision making cadence in your business, the faster you grow. The more sales meetings you have, the more sales. Meetings are meant to be for making decisions, closing deals, progress updates and getting people onto the same page, and this often requires getting people into the same room.

But I still hate meetings

With all the innovation over the last two decades, and with the internet at our fingertips, meetings still haven’t changed one bit! The best we’ve done is swap the utility of a telephone with online video calls. Surely it’s time for an upgrade?

And this is why we made room.sh — A better way to Meeting

There’s too much friction having a meeting over multiple mediums such as Zoom + Google Docs. We’ve created room.sh to be a more seamless experience and a much easier way to collaborate.

And here are the 5 reasons why with room.sh, your meetings will never be the same again:

(1) Collaboration-Centric

Meetings are about more than just face-to-face communication, they’re about collaboration.

room.sh is a one-click connect, browser-based, video calling platform that combines collaborative tools such as a digital whiteboard, and shared text and code editors.

Here’s what your online meetings should now look like:

Some of the unique things you can do:

• [0:00] Automatically save meeting rooms, and access them anytime, anywhere, exactly as you left them.
• [0:03] Browser-based, one-click connect, no installs.
• [0:05] Lock rooms, and keep things private.
• [0:13] Invite colleagues or external participants for video conferencing
• [0:34] Create Whiteboard tabs for sharing and interacting.
• [0:41] Multiple screenshares, screen grabs, and editing.
• [0:59] Video grabs at the click of a button.
• [1:26] Create Document Editor Tab
• [1:40] Upload documents (PDFs etc)
• [1:50] Advanced troubleshooting so you can see exactly what is causing trouble for you or your other participants.

(2) Consolidate Everything

All of your meetings are conveniently stored and easily referenced. Isn’t that why we love Slack, a quick way to store and reference past information?

room.sh allows that for online meetings. Anything you discuss, decide, or produce, is logged, stored and easily referenced for the next meeting. Not unlike Google Docs, you can invite your colleagues or customers and store your rooms in an organized manner.

(3) Asynchronous Meetings (Say What?!)

Meetings no longer need to be at a set time for a set duration. They can be far more elastic. When a meeting is finished, it is still open, accessible and editable.

Maybe you’re conducting job interviews, why not give your applicants 30minutes in the room before you. (Maybe you’ve set out some coding challenges?)

Jump on where you left off. Each meeting is its own room. Join the room and have everything exactly as you left it the previous time. Imagine walking into a meeting room in your office and the whiteboards are exactly as you left them the week before?

[On the roadmap] A colleague joins 5-minutes late? They can watch at 2x speed until they join the live meeting — Lovely.

(4) One-click-connect, no installs

Yes, room.sh is browser-based, one-click-connect. Importantly, room.sh is reliable with an advanced troubleshooting service, this is to ensure there’s no more “can you hear me now?” and the first 10 minutes of your meeting is wasted getting connected.

It is frustrating when an online meeting tool isn’t working, (This happens to me surprisingly frequently?) but with our advanced troubleshooting tool, we’ll importantly tell you exactly what either you or your participant is struggling with. Maybe they’ve blocked their camera or have a poor internet connection — we’ll tell you exactly what the problem is, room.sh needs to be as easy to use as a pencil and paper.

(5) Your Team? there’s also an API…but shhh.

Want to get this set up for your team or business, add all your employees and get some specific features to make your meetings a win?

We’re currently piloting this with a couple of cool cat companies and if you’d be interested in joining, let us know and we’ll send you some more information on how this can work for your team. Shoot us an email at team@room.sh.

Want to integrate with our Collaboration API? Or want to build on top of our API? Here’s an example of an enterprise client, let us know how we can help you at api@room.sh,

Lastly, please help!

We’ve just launched our Beta, it’s free, but we need your help:

• Use room.sh for your next meeting — give it a go!
• Give us feedback — on our website — here
• Upvote us on Hacker News and Product Hunt
• Retweet, etc, @roomdotsh, #roomdotsh #abetterwaytomeeting
• Share this article (especially if you have friends in different locations — is a big help for the #algorithms)

Happy Meeting — Matthew and the room.sh Team.