Alternatives
Products that do what Meet Geisha does
For the past couple of months, I’ve been working with a total stranger, @ahmetsulek. We’ve never met in real life, and our communication has been restricted to Skype. And that’s Skype call, not video. Whilst it’s advised that one should only team up with somebody they’ve known for a long time, I’ve found this not to be necessary. Instead, all you need is a dose of mutual respect and a clear partnership agreement. We’ve been working together for the past couple of months on a web app and Chrome Extension that aggregates sites like Hacker News, Designer News, Sidebar.io, Behance and Dribbble…
- 1FI
This is something fun I’ve been hacking on recently: ridiculously simple group chat. Go to http://faces.io and then get your friends to do the same. That’s it! :-D Currently works best in Chrome. It’s definitely beta status at best. Audio can get weird—be ready to mute. ;-) Let me know what you think!
2014
- 2HM
Hey HN, I've been a long time HN reader and here is my first contribution. Hoodsup.me is a chat-based matchmaking app built on top of your Facebook social graph. It matchmakes you with people who are geographically close to you and with whom you share common points. You can optionally activate your webcam to talk face-to-face with your partner. Think of it as a Sonar meets a genital-free Chatroulette. I would love to get some feedback. It's only optimized for WebKit for now. No signup is required so just stop by and say hi! :) Clickable link: <a…
2011 · hoodsup.me
- 3MW
I always find myself frustrated by how many steps I have to take to video chat with someone online. There's always too much software to download and install, and too many accounts to remember. The high-end, high-price Cisco conferencing systems I've used are especially fragile. So I built Vidless in a weekend for myself, and I hope you find it useful too. Just create a room and share the link, and you'll be chatting in seconds. You can invite several people (I haven't really tested a max yet), and chats on Vidless are always private. Enjoy!
2012 · vidless.com
- 4SO
Hey HN, My co-founders and I have been working on a project for the last month or so, and we'd like to get your input on it. We wanted to hear your thoughts on what we're doing - so check out our landing page, and let us know what you think/understand. Does it sounds like something you guys would want to use? http://www.thesharedweb.com/alpha/intro We'll tell you guys more about exactly what we're doing as the conversation evolves, but we just wanted to see what the initial reaction is, and what you understand (i.e. are we describing it in a way that makes sense). Really excited to hear your…
2010 · thesharedweb.com
- 5IM
Inspired by a good friend who did Unstick.me, as well as the recent MVP for 1k project, I've decided to give consulting a shot by offering my services as a developer and product guy to non-technical folks and early-stage web startups who are looking to brainstorm on both the technology and product side, and possibly looking to have an MVP built based on their idea. I started accepting requests the other day solely with a Wufoo form, and just launched a proper one-page site here: http://youshouldworkwith.me/ Curious to hear feedback on the offer and idea in general. It's the first time I've…
2011
- 6NP
I created a pet project to see if it is of use and interesting to people. The idea is on-demand real-time chat rooms for trending topics and for personal use. You can go to the main page at www.urshoutbox.com to create your own room then share it across your social networks/email, etc. I created a hacker news specific "shoutbox" at http://www.urshoutbox.com/bLmYAL/hacker-news . If nobody is in there, please be patient and (I hope) people will join soon to start talking. The idea is to have trending topics on facebook/twitter/etc and have chat rooms to get…
2014 · urshoutbox.com
- 7WA
Hi I'm Akina from Japan and we develop new SNS named bajji(badge). bajji will visualize reliable relationships. You can connect only with person actually you've met by using our app. And only those who met in person with you can give your assessment to you.By using blockchain, data could be fair to anyone. It keeps service reliability. 1,000 users in Japan and we are trying to expand this service to worldwide as a next step. bajji will solve digital rights on social web. Could you feedback about service for me? Here is my invite URL. If you register from this URL, you and I will get some…
2019
- 8HA
Hello HN! Here's my November Startup Sprint project (coded in two days). http://hackerlunch.com It allows you to post your lunch plans and lets other hackers join you. I built this because I often see HN users are interested in meeting each other if they are in the same area. I am not a coder, so this version is very rough. If people use it, I will work with others to build a more polished version. I would love some feedback. What do you think? Is this something you will be using?
2010
- 9WM
TLDR: It’s like giving Samantha from “Her” a phone number, email address, a few of your accounts and a few sub-agents to do real work. Hi HN! We are Joseph and Julius, and we built personalized remote coworkers in the cloud. We call these remote coworkers “Personas” and we give each one a name, email address and phone number. Today, we’re launching Personas with “skills” for reminders, scheduling and email management tasks (as seen on our home page), and our goal is to add at least one new skill every week. We’re curious to hear what you all want to use Personas for so please email us your…
Sep 2025 · withtime.ai
- 10IM
Hi HN ! I've struggled with anxiety for most of my life. But I was lucky to have a supporting family and friends. Not everyone has this chance. So I made Wiro Talk to help strangers pair up and check on each other. Check it out and tell me what you think. It's an mvp so yes it's using discord at the moment.
2023 · wirotalk.com
- 11TI
Hello HN, I built Teamates.io[0] - a place for professionals to have small coffee chats with a random partner right now. Think of it like a virtual coffeeshop where you can chat with strangers while you're taking a little break. It's in open beta and you can try using it right now. Please be nice and professional to each other :) I noticed over the course of pandemic I missed random coffee chats with my coworkers and random chats with strangers. I think it's important to have these unplanned conversations. I would really appreciate the feedback from you all, since I believe it's a pretty…
2021
- 12IM
orignally shared this on startup school... i thought id' share it here. i'm using a `nocode communication tool` (a web-based interface... a single browser tab!) for all of these things: 1. landing page — the landing page is the product and i wanted for folks to feel "transported" right into the app without having to walk through a shitty b2b marketing-style content. this is akin to my experience back in the `BBS` days of the mid-90's where you were immediately into the app, community, and tool. no terms of service, no privacy policy. just pure, immediate value. 2. building community — we…
2021
- 13TA
Hi HN, For years I’ve missed the feeling of an always-on chatroom without the silos and social overhead of Discord. So I built Together: a single-room, no-signup group chat that you join with one click. No channels, no rules (yet), no onboarding flow. Everyone lands in the same place and can start talking in under a second. Why I made it - Forums and blog comments are great but slow; Discord/Slack feel heavy for casual drop-ins if you aren’t already a member of a community. - I wanted the simplest possible space where ~100 people could idle, share shower thoughts, and keep the…
Oct 2025 · together.lol
- 14GS
This weekend I finally shipped Gryt, a project I’ve been building since 2022 — an open-source, self-hostable Discord-style app focused on reliable voice chat + text. I’m the creator. I started it after getting fed up with Discord disconnects/paywalls and wanted something self-hosted and auditable. I started on this in 2022 and had an early proof-of-concept working back then (auth + friends list), but I quickly realized WebRTC voice isn’t something you can duct-tape together. I spent a big chunk of the next couple years learning the stack (ICE/DTLS-SRTP, NAT traversal, SFU design),…
Feb 2026 · gryt.chat
- 15CS
I have just launched a project that has been sitting on my hard drive 80% finished for the better part of a year. http://www.chatroulettespy.com It detects your 'anonymous' chat partner's IP address and performs a geolocation lookup on it to show the user the partner's approximate location on a map. I know the Chatroulette fad has peaked a long time ago (when I started this project), but there are still many people using it and its many clones. It was important for me to follow through on this one and not let it die on my hard drive like many projects before. I would appreciate any feedback…
2011
- 16RW
Hey Hackernews! My names Olly (a Designer from the UK). I’ve been a long time lurker on Hackernews but now I finally have something to share with the community. Along with my friend Oliver (Developer, Sweden/Japan) we have been working on Remotewise.io. It’s a new resource and learning platform dedicated to remote work. We’ve both been working remotely for most of our careers. Over this time remote work has been gaining huge momentum as a viable and desirable way to work and we believe it’s the future. We’ve been working on this during our evenings and weekends in between our full-time…
2019
- 17MA
Hi there, So a buddy a couple of days ago came up with the idea for a new SaaS product regarding gpt and image generation. We did a quick MVP that barely works, it breaks almost 50% of the time but we still wanted to validate the idea before going all in. We have almost 1k followers on Twitter together. Did a quick post describing the idea with a stripe link in the comments with a 5$ value, no landing page, and no shipped product. In exchange, the buyers become beta users. Around 30 mins later we got our first sale next 30 mins another 5$ and so on. Do we consider the idea validated? The…
2023
- 18IA
It has been a while since I have shared my app, that I made to be able to practice my Danish while chatting with my grilfriend - I often used GPT to write as much as I can in Danish, and I replaced the words I didn't know with {Englis words in curly braces}. While this was great, it was rather annoying to type the prompt always, so I figured a GPT wrapper would work well here. Last time when I launched, it went viral! I was super happy (and grateful!) for all the feedback and excitement — but it also meant my tokens disappeared fast, and many people ended up trying an app that no longer…
Oct 2025 · menerdu.com
- 19SS
hey hey! I'm the co-founder of squads -- a product that makes it easy to see what your friends and top investors are doing in web3. This product was developed out my own frustration trying to get more involved in web3. One of the greatest challenges in the crypto space is figuring out where to start. For some of us, we're lucky to have a friend who can serve as a guide, and we wanted to build a product that would make introducing your friends to crypto a more inviting experience. There is so much alpha and information living on Twitter + Discord, but the problem is finding the signal from…
2022 · beta.squads.xyz
- 20TU
This server started a few weeks ago via some HN comments. It's very unofficial! There'll probably be some negative comments about discord. I know that many people dislike discord. (Side note: I hope more founders build discord alternatives) If you're active on discord and would like a HN channel, feel free to join. The server has the same guidelines as HN: > On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity. > Off-Topic:…
2023 · discord.com
- 21QU
So I just did my semi-annual "log in to Twitter to see if it's any good yet", and found that in my absence I had followed a few thousand new spam accounts. Sweet. That explains why they emailed me and forced me to change my password last year. Being Awesome, Twitter doesn't have any way to simply toss out all your followers and start from scratch. And none of the spammy apps claiming to do so actually will (even seemingly after charging you money to try). So instead, I just pulled open the Dev console and did this:…
2014
- 22AS
Hello Hacker News! In the past few weeks I've been working on a side project that allows you to post anonymously a short message and a photo that is tied to your location. Other people can see posts around them in a radius of 1 kilometer. Posts are ephemeral and disappear after one day. That's all. It started as an exercise to try to write a geohash index and to try nodejs and Redis. I'm not sure if/how it could be useful. Maybe it could be used as a quick way of sharing something with someone next to you, or to leave a reminder for someone at a specific location. Or it could be abused…
2015
- 23CY
I am Amit, Co-Founder of Chatterrapp (https://chatterrapp.com). We are building a platform to let users have video chat with others sharing similar interests. Currently we are accepting sign ups for our Beta product. We tried many of existing platforms similar to ours and came across some major flaws like: - annoying chatbots posing as real users - obscene/offensive behaviour - irrelevant matches - no regard for user’s preferences/interests - non-persistent user profiles So we went ahead and surveyed as well as interviewed hundreds of potential users and found a common…
2017
- 24MO
Sup HN, So a couple of months ago I posted my OSINT app ShadowBroker here and got WAY more attention than I expected. Some of the feedback was brutal, but honestly, a lot of it was right, and it made the project a lot better. And sure, I had a blast tracking billionaire jets and yachts or discovering GPS jamming in Ukraine was a thrill, and so was watching CCTV feeds from London, along with ships, satellites, conflict zones, etc., but eventually it dawned on me…where does my OSINT dashboard actually go from there? What good is all of the telemetry if people cannot communicate with each other…
May 2026 · github.com
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