Hi,
I am thinking about creating a collaborative screen sharing application with dual cursors. This is similar to ScreenHero which is no longer available standalone after acquisition by Slack.
Does this sound like something you would want to use and would pay for? If you are interested please register at http://superscreenshare.com/
Thanks.
You donāt need to ask.
ScreenHero validated this idea and now that the stand-alone app is gone and, as far as I know, thereās no alternative, the market is yours for the taking.
The only problem here is execution.
Youāll find out that this is hard to do and youāll have to dig deep into both Windows and Mac OS internals to implement dual cursors etc.
FYI: ScreenHero was made by 4 people: a designer and 3 programmers (I interviewed there for a job before Slack acquisition).
I think itās a stretch, but doable project for a really good C++ programmer willing to work hard.
@kjk, thanks a lot.
I am sure I can lift this off from technical perspective (I am a C++ dev, experience with internals, etc).
I am a lot less confident about the size of the market and my ability to reach it.
What makes me worry is that I cannot find people complaining about the pain that this is addressing. When there is a problem I expect to see it mentioned in blogs, forums, etc. This is usually my starting point to start building an audience and the initial marketing campaign for a new product. I cannot see much talk about screen sharing as a pain, everybody seems to be happy about traditional Teamviewer, Skype, etc screen casting.
It may be the case that people donāt even know that a better approach is possible. This will make it so much harder for me to sell it, I will also need to educate about the problem.
Since you mentioned interviewing at ScreenHero, do you have any sense about how many customers they had before they were acquired?
I donāt know how much money the made. They had enough users to be VC funded and get bought by Slack.
Iām not usually an optimist (see my other posts) and there are no guarantees in life but I have no doubt that in this particular case if you build it, theyāll come.
With intelligent pricing (free for limited use for individuals to get them to try it and get hooked; $29/mo/user for company accounts) this is swimming-in-cach business for whoever gets there first.
This is a recent HN thread āAsk HN: Does a viable alternative to ScreenHero exist?ā https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13620626
People are asking for this product. As far as validation, it doesnāt get better than this.
Those are mentions of screenhero on HN: https://hn.algolia.com/?query=screenhero&sort=byPopularity&prefix&page=0&dateRange=all&type=story
You donāt even have to market it too much. Once itās out people will be recommending it to each other like this: https://stackoverflow.com/search?q=screenhero
can you explain the ādual-cursorsā feature. What made it special?
You mentioned Slack bought it out. Does that mean its available through Slackās screen-sharing feature?
A traditional screen-sharing is: you have a screen, you allow other people to see it but only you can make changes i.e. there is only one mouse cursor and its yours.
ScreenHero was collaborative i.e. you were also able to allow the other person to control the screen i.e. each of you had independent mouse cursor/keyboard and could make changes at the same time.
I donāt know of ScreenHero is the only program that could do that, but itās certainly rare.
Itās also why implementing this is hard. Neither Windows nor Mac have notion of two cursor operating on windows at the same time, so Iām sure they had a lot of fun figuring out how to handle focus between two users.
I believe Slack bought ScreenHero team to implement screen-sharing functionality, although I donāt think Slackās screen-sharing works the same way as ScreenHero. Havenāt used it though, so might be wrong.
Either way, I think ScreenHero was differentiated enough to become very successful and now that it doesnāt exist, thereās a clear opportunity in essentially writing a clone.
That actually sounds really cool! The first thing that comes to mind is remote online tutors for students. Itās a bit of a niche market, and Iām sure there are plenty of other applications. I would definitely try it out.
Would you be able to do other inputs besides just a second cursor? E.g. could you type things from your keyboard where ever youāre cursor was?
Yes, I believe keyboard of the other person was also working.
Iāve used both GoToMeeting and WebEx that has this feature (both people can use mouse keyboard to interact with the presentation pc)
I think that TeamViewer and Join.me also allows this (and are free for personal use)
If so then it doesnāt really seem to be an undeserved niche. Have I misunderstood?
(As an aside it would be fantastic to be able to āmuteā the other persons mouse movements - Iāve been on many support sessions where the other person just canāt resist fiddling with the mouse whilst youāre trying to do something - mouse tourettes!)
Interesting.
Maybe itās a matter of positioning.
Both GoToMeeting and WebEx are marketed as āonline meetingsā.
ScreenHero was all about collaborating on a shared screen.
Although reading https://www.gotomeeting.com/meeting/pricing, they talk about ākeyboard & mouse sharingā.
In ScreenHero, you didnāt āshareā the mouse. You can think of it as having 2 independent keyboards and mouses connected, both being able to do work at the same time.
Thatās the tricky part to implement.
Isnāt VNC something like it? It is definitively not packaged nicely, but it works across linux, macos, windows.
VNC is for accessing a remote display yourself.
ScreenHero was about sharing your display with someone else and working together.
There are superficial similarities but the use cases and feature set make ScreenHero a separate app category.