Show HN: JumpAsync – Bye scheduled meetings, hi asynchronous video collaboration

[saljump]

Hi Show HN, I'm really excited to share a project I have been working on, JumpAsync.com. The idea of building a tool like this came about when I was working in a team as a software engineer. My coworkers and I were working from opposite parts of the world and found it difficult to attend scrum ceremonies synchronously. I decided to build a tool for teams to work remotely across timezones, without distractions and the need for scheduled meetings. Send a link with an agenda, the team participates by recording screen share and talking head videos at their own time, and interact with comments and reactions. If you're like me, you probably don’t enjoy spending hours on video conferencing and Zoom meetings. I encourage you to try it out if this looks interesting. Thank you and I’m open to any feedback.

[handsprings]

We have a team of 20 spread across 6 timezones, not to mention our customers. Communication has definitely been a problem and we haven't found a good solution. Will definitely have a look at JumpAsync.

My question would be...how do you effectively manage back-and-forth discussion asynchronously? How do you keep the huddle on topic and drive an outcome when you are waiting 24hrs for a reply?

[saljump]

Thanks for asking, this is a really good question!

In the JumpAsync app, the huddle topic and agenda are displayed on the main huddle page as well as the page where participants are recording their thoughts, it helps participants keep the topic on track.

In the agenda be sure to ask questions that points to an outcome if that's the goal of the huddle. Participants can interact and comment on each other’s recordings and discuss outcomes.

All the recordings are automatically transcribed so it's possible to go through them and note down outcomes and action points in a section on the huddles page.

I'd like to think that asynchronous communication is more deliberate and succinct than casual chats or meetings. People tend to organise their thoughts and think though what they say more intentionally and hopefully that drives more meaningful discussions and outcomes. Especially when participants know that responses can take up to 24 hours!

This is definitely the hard part of running distributed meetings. In the future I'd like to add more features to facilitate an outcome-driven approach to meetings. Let me know if you have any feature suggestions that can help with this.

[saljump]

TL;DR

Work remotely across timezones without scheduled meetings.

Try it out if you and your team are frustrated with spending hours on video meetings.