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Squad (Acquired by Twitter in 2020) — Screen share with friends from a group video chat ✨
Acquired by Twitter in 2020. Squad lets you hang out with friends in all of your favorite apps. Start a group video chat, then broadcast your screen so everyone can see what you see. Show friends anything on your phone from text messages to TikTok videos.
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@whydoinot @rrhoover it's always a difficult decision to switch directions but our mission from the very beginning was “build connection & empathy between people” — the very first side project we built together was EstherBot, which was to help people get to know me / stay connected with me even if I wasn’t available… that lead to Molly, which automatically answered questions about people. We built cutting edge ML tech in pursuit of that, but we weren’t seeing the kind of retention we needed and the deeper we got into it the more it seemed the tech was potentially better suited to business use cases, so I started considering other options because my passion has always been social consumer.
Like any idea, there are multiple sources — but I give my 13yr old daughter Emma credit for a lot of the inspiration. She was like, “omg why can’t I show stuff to my friends without taking a million screen recordings?!” and I was like, "yea, that sucks and I have the same problem... there must be a better way!" 😆Around the same time Ethan noticed that iOS was adding some more functionality for better screen sharing experiences through ReplayKit 2 — and that’s when we started prototyping to see if there was a new opening to build something cool and different. And, there was. So, here we are! 😊
I'll also add, the first half of my career was spent in social video (I was one of the first professional YouTubers and then started an agency that placed a big emphasis on inspiring & surfacing video UGC) so having a lot of background in the space is super helpful leading product and doing all the design for Squad.
And finally, I wrote a blog post talking more about my personal story and how Squad connects deeply to my life’s work / mission: https://medium.com/@EstherCrawfo...
Ok... this is awesome. I *love* consumer focused products like this that have the potential to make certain behaviors easier for people to do. I can also see remote teams finding a lot of use out of the screen-sharing feature for co-browsing. Nice work @esthercrawford and @whydoinot =) can't wait to see how Squad evolves.
Congrats Esther. Loved the concept. It has potential of turning into something huge. Good luck!
@basche42 that means a lot to me coming from you given your vast product experience, so thank you Ben! 🙏
@textras thanks! I definitely played around with shared web browsing experiences back in the day too 🤓 and yes, we are in progress with an Android version (which will have some extra cool functionality thanks to the picture-in-a-picture capabilities!) but figured we'd go ahead and get the iOS version out since it was ready to ship first ⛵️... having a lot of consumer experience we've learned to ship early & often -- plus it was drilled into us during YC W18 😊... I can still hear @mwseibel asking teams each week "when are you launching?!" 😂
Incredible idea. While using Squad, I found it hard to believe that it didn't exist before. It has really made experiencing things *together* so seamless and enjoyable. Kudos to the team for executing so well, and for making empathy and connection more possible in an increasingly disconnected would.
Hello everyone… I’m excited to welcome you into our public beta! 😊🥳
Squad is the first iOS app to make it easy and fun to share your screen with friends. It’s the next best thing to being together IRL.
You can show friends literally anything on your phone. Just start a video chat and then turn on a broadcast so everyone can see what you see. 😳😂😍
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Our mission is to increase connection and empathy — while reducing the loneliness that comes from scrolling and swiping by yourself.
With Squad we’re empowering you to turn *any* app into a shared social experience. What you'd normally do alone, you can now do with friends. 👯♀️
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Some of the ways our private beta testers used Squad surprised us; for instance, a user told us she did a gender reveal to her closest friends by opening the Photos app to show a video of her most recent sonogram. They could all see the video and she got to get their reactions to the news live, even though they were all in different locations. 💜
Other surprising ways Squad is used:
· homework help
· reading Blind (Yik Yak for companies)
· tech support for family members
Unsurprising ways Squad is used:
· hanging out on social media and in dating apps
· showing each other text messages / photos
· real-time coordination of travel & food
· playing games, watching videos & listening to music
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Yes, we have an Android version in the works and it’ll have some fun additional functionality. Add yourself to the list if you want to be an external tester: http://squadapp.io/
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Our experience in YC taught us to launch sooner than is comfortable, so here we are. 😬 We’re excited to hear your feedback — send me a message or start a video chat with me. I’m automatically everyone’s friend in the app. 🙌
I'm happy to answer any questions, so ask away!
iPhone scrensharing while video chatting is the app we’ve all been needing. With great power comes great responsibility, tho! Know what’s on your phone before you share it, people. Stay safe when you Squad... because we all know that once you try it, you will. not. stop.
Pros:iPhone screensharing!!!!!!!!! 📲
Cons:That nude your mom can’t unsee 😳. Constantly being asked for tech support by grandpa 👨🏽🦳
This is so awesome! I remember talking to Esther about it a few months back and then played around with it a few weeks back. And I was surprised how quickly multiple usecases emerged. Social online shopping for my wife and her mom, showing bugs and issues to my team at work, to having a discussion with an old friend around Mughal paintings that we both could see and talk about together in real time. Love the experience!
I love how Squad makes ANY app a social and shareable experience. I currently keep sharing links with my wife for stuff like furniture or screenshots and screen recordings with my cofounders for bugs. And this makes these things way more easier!
Pros:Really cool concept and super useful for stuff like online shopping with family/friends and specially helping parents navigate their devices
Cons:Not on Android yet but I hope that will happen soon
Great concept! I've wondered whether it's just a matter of time before social screen sharing became mainstream practice, and hopefully this is the time. Good luck!
@j_sherwani thanks! it definitely feels like the time is right for social screen sharing -- the functionality on iOS is admittedly not as rich as we'd like (no picture-in-picture is allowed at the OS level of iOS yet like it now is on Android) but there's *just* enough to make a run for it, which is what we're doing 🙌
@esthercrawford I live this idea and when to test it on my phone but it seems to get stuck at searching for contacts. Is there a way to by-pass this and then invite specific people to join me on the app? I actually don't have a current mobile provider connected on my iPhone as I use my Android for calls and us my iPhone exclusively on wifi for content creation and live streaming. Thanks
Love looking at this in the reverse, that you're turning every app into a social app!
My younger girl cousins livestream all the time, they're so fearless with a camera, but what blew my mind is how passive their streams are. They just sit there doing their homework while their friends pop in and out to say hello or just chill with them. Basically they're beating their loneliness but without actively socializing. Cool.
I'm bringing this up partly because I wonder if the typical "look at us making eye contact and laughing" app preview isn't as real as the "let me put up my spotify so we can chill and do homework for an hour before I see you at soccer practice" one.
Just thinking aloud! Always excited for a new app in my favorite category, and this one looks especially good. Good luck with the beta!
@aidan you are so spot on -- your intuition maps 100% to what we've learned from our thousands of beta users... 👍 so far the sweet spot for us has been 13-19 year old girls and they will hang out on Squad for literally *hours* while they're doing multiple things (eating, doing homework, messaging on their phone). They often do exactly what you're describing -- they may not be paying a ton of attention to what's on the screen until they're told to. Since multiple people can stream their screens at once, they can pop in-and-out of watching when it makes sense... like when someone says "omg look at this DM I just got!" then all eyeballs are on the screen of the person who has something interesting to see. Gen Z uses video chat in a totally different way than Millennials who are more careful about keeping themselves in the frame and paying attention to the conversation -- Gen Z turns the group chat on, then goes about their normal life.
This is great. I've wanted to build something like this before but didn't even know if it was technically possible. I could also see this being used when with friends around a dinner table. I often go to dinner with friends and people are trying to show the table something on their phone, which is difficult with big groups.
As an early alpha user hanging out in apps with my kids, I immediately saw its potential to bring people together in a brilliant new way. It makes social media feel "multiplayer".
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