HackerNoon Reporter: Please tell us briefly about your background.
I'm Charley, cofounder/CTO of Remotion. I'm currently located in Chicago, Illinois, but I used to work in SF at Google.
What's your startup called? And in a sentence or two, what does it do?
Remotion is a virtual office that puts your hybrid team right on your desktop. It helps you connect with your team like everyone's together.
What is the origin story?
Back in 2019, I was in the process of moving to Chicago for my partner's career. At the time, I was working on a different startup idea with my cofounder, Alexander. We were used to working in person in SF, and we immediately noticed how much harder it was to work creatively and collaboratively when not colocated. We looked through a variety of tools, and realized that no one had made the right product to solve our problems yet - so we built it ourselves!
What do you love about your team, and why are you the ones to solve this problem?
Our team is highly distributed and motivated to solve the problems of Remote work. Everyone on the team is constantly thinking about how we can improve our product to help ourselves become even more collaborative.
If you weren’t building your startup, what would you be doing?
Probably building some other kind of software tool!
At the moment, how do you measure success? What are your core metrics?
Call minutes, number of calls, average call lengths. We get excited to see lots of short <5 min calls where people are getting answers to quick questions, and lots of long >1 hr calls where people are hanging out and coworking.
What’s most exciting about your traction to date?
Our recent launch on Product Hunt (https://www.producthunt.com/posts/remotion-2-0) - most importantly, it was incredible seeing all the reviews by our passionate users!
What technologies are you currently most excited about, and most worried about? And why?
Hybrid work tools are really exciting - I'm looking forward to being able to go back into an office, but it won't look the same. I want to be able to have meetings while in person without feeling like the remote teammates are left out. There are a lot of technologies being developed to help create that kind of inclusive meeting right now, like hybrid audio echo cancellation, or VR meeting tools, etc.
What drew you to get published on HackerNoon? What do you like most about our platform?
The focus on small, early-stage startup engineering - I love reading about how other startups approach solving the same technical problems we do, especially compared to larger tech company building - the way we approach solving problems is very different, and HackerNoon is a consistently great resource for this.
What advice would you give to the 21-year-old version of yourself?
Keep building, and as long as what you make is useful everything else will be okay.
What is something surprising you've learned this year that your contemporaries would benefit from knowing?
Meetings aren't the answer to creating collaboration - they're too transactional.
Remotion is currently available for free for macOS.
Vote for Remotion for Startup of the Year, San Francisco, California