#sqwiggle

This is probably episode 0 of George and Thomas talking about things. We need all of your feedbacks before we can record episode 1.

Without further adieu, your show notes:

Are there catacombs in most basements?

Is RumpusRoom even a thing?

How many Dolby's can you fit into a room?

Logitech is not one of our sponsors.

~10:53 George Leaves at this time.

Stuff you Should Know has a lot of episodes.

Thomas is working on Primeloop. George is the prime loop at WorkingOn.

George likes Sqwiggle: usesqwigglebox.net/io

Thomas likes Ingress (Not Egrets)

Of COURSE George knows what kek kek kek means.

(Is this interesting AT ALL??!!)

"There is a difference in calling someone an idiot to their face, and just plain hating them."

"All we need is love." – Einstein – or maybe Mark Twain

Slack is also not one of our sponsors.

George really wants to talk about the NomadList slack community. Thomas is kind of certain Mark Cicoria told him about it.

Gif vs Jif debate continues

However, Mailchimp IS the sponsor of a podcast called Serial, which is SWEEPING THE NATION.

Chris Sacca, not Michael Sacca, pitched Ira Glass' pants off.

Go buy one of those fancy $280 record player needle things.

cover art: Rumpus Room via daryl_mitchell song: Little Brother (Claire x WKND) by Max Seethaler

In the early days of Sqwiggle, we knew how important it would be to get as many beta testers on our early prototype as possible. We weren't even close to being ready to launch publicly, but we knew that user feedback would be critical in helping us craft the product and get it ready for an official launch.

It was tough getting those initial eyeballs on our beta signup page, but here are a few techniques that ended up working really well for us. 

Submit your site to Betali.st

Betali.st is a great site created by Marc Köhlbrugge which showcases new startups that are looking for beta testers. It's a great way to tap into the early adopter market and can end up driving hundreds of beta signups from a single post.

Submit your site to Product Hunt

Product Hunt is another great site for driving some initial traffic to your site (and getting some very constructive feedback!). Products are posted daily to Product Hunt and ranked by the community. Generally, they prefer sites which are currently open to the public, but they do make exceptions:

"Generally we encourage submissions of products that are available to download or buy immediately; however, the occasional crowdfunded, pre-launch, or private beta submission is acceptable if it's awesome!"

Post on Hacker News

As soon as we had a working prototype for Sqwiggle, we threw together a quick video demoing the product and posted it to youtube. Then we submitted it to Hacker News under "Show HN". The video got some attention, which lead to some high quality signups.

Someone from Techcrunch also reached out and was interested in doing a write-up, which subsequently drove even more signups. This article ended up playing a key role in getting our early product out the door publicly since it afforded us a base from which to launch our public product.

Ask other founders and thought leaders for help

Sometimes it's as simple as reaching out and asking other founders or thought leaders in your industry to take a look at your site and give you some feedback. If they like it, there's a good chance they will share it out to their network.

This one has huge potential but may take you out of your comfort zone (which is a good thing). It definitely worked out well for us and lead to some really solid relationships with other like minded and well connected people.

Answer questions on Quora

Quora can be a great tool for driving high quality traffic to your product. If you provide intelligent, well thought out answers to the community, some users may pay a visit to your site. Since Quora attaches your bio to every answer you give, this is a great spot to share what you're working on.

So those are some of the techniques that worked well for us here at Sqwiggle. If you have any other tips for driving traffic to your beta signup, let me know in the comments section below!

Just hours ago we pushed out a brand new version of Sqwiggle for Mac (0.3). It includes a whole bunch of great enhancements and a fresh design update that brings it inline with our web experience. Just some of the many fixes and improvements included:

Entirely new design

The camera turns off to save battery when possible

Hibernate mode stops the camera immediately turning on after sleep

It’s now possible to delete messages in the chat stream

Improved team pane with ability to promote users

Improved connection quality indicator when in a video conversation

Improved notifications when a video conversation starts

A fancy new dock icon

Larger and better laid out videos

Stream support for tweets

Stream support for GIF’s improved (give it a try!)

CTRL+B shortcut now toggles busy mode

Stream commands are no longer case sensitive

Emoticons no longer showing within a timestamp

If you haven't tried the desktop app yet, give it a whirl as there are a number of advantages over the web app including native notifications and pausing of your music when video starts :-)

Today we're very happy to announce that Sqwiggle has closed a $1.1million round of seed funding from an incredible group of investors, we did a quick video interview with TechCrunch too.

Raising a round of funding is incredibly hard, and in a lot of ways we landed on our feet and had an easier job than many other new companies do thanks to Naval and the AngelList Syndicates product. Despite this, it's still incredible how many people it takes to go from the idea of raising to actually closing! We've never sat at tables with so many smart people and had so much help from people we admire.

Inspired by Walter Chen's blog post we thought it would be appropriate to give gratitude to all of those that helped in making the round happen including but not limited to...

Artur Adib

Ash Fontana

Babak Nivi

Ben Lewis

Brett deMarrais

Chris Evdemon

David Kopf

Davy Kestens

Deng-Kai Chen

Devdutt Yellurkar

Dharmesh Shah

Dustin Dolginow

Ed Roman

Elad Gil

Greg Kumparak

Howard Lindzon

John Reinsch

Jonathon Triest

Kamal Ravikant

Laney Thornton

Mark Tomlinson

Mary Kate Bacalao

Mickey Du

Mike Collett

Nabeel Hyatt

Naval Ravikant

Ryan Boyce

Rahul Prakash

Rafael Corrales

Ted Serbinski

Wade Foster

Walter Chen

All our customers and beta users!

So What Now?

The most important thing on our immediate horizon is to build an incredible product for distributed and remote companies, and to do that we need a passionate and talented team.

We're hiring right now so if the thought of changing the way thousands (perhaps millions) of people work everyday floats your boat then please drop us an email!