Tandem is a virtual office to connect effortlessly with your distributed or hybrid team. See who’s around, talk in one click. Unlock serendipity and real-time collaboration.
Hi PH! I'm Rajiv, co-founder of Tandem along with @bernatfortet and @iambetaful.
We launched nearly 2 years ago (the PH community's feedback was key to setting our product direction) and we've learned a ton since then:
- We've learned how crucial audio-video reliability and performance are, and we've invested deeply in infra to give you the best possible experience.
- Despite all the ink spilled on asynchronous work, at the end of the day, we build relationships, friendships, visions, and strong teams by talking.
- Presence is more than signals - it's about Stories, feeling connected with, and aware of, conversations your teammates are having.
- As the world starts going hybrid, the Virtual Office and the Physical Office need to co-exist and become intimately aware of each other.
- Through supporting and listening closely to larger companies, we've learned how to scale serendipity! (see Team Tables below)
Tandem is, no joke, 1000x better than when we launched. We've kept the lightweight desktop interface, and added powerful ways to connect, collaborate, and be human with your team. We also recently reached a truly awesome milestone:
2 million hours of calls on Tandem! 🏄♀️ 🙌
We started Tandem when my co-founders each had kids and we started working remotely. We missed the flow and camaraderie of working together, so we started building. Since then, my co-founders' kids are walking and talking (and high-fiving us on Tandem), and we've been joined by a truly world-class set of builders and thinkers that have pushed our vision of Tandem further and further.
We're launching three new features here on Product Hunt:
👥 Team Tables - serendipity and co-working! Get a coffeeshop vibe with "overhearing" (to activate for your team, go to Settings > Team Settings > scroll down for Team Tables)
📱 Mobile (iOS + Android) - Great for walking 1-on-1s! It's a virtual office in your pocket!
📅 Never be late to a Meeting - stay in flow with Meeting Reminders and Auto-Join, and see when your next meeting is at a glance. No more checking Calendar!
We've kept the streamlined, minimal desktop app that doesn't get in your way, and improved some of our best-loved features:
- Hybrid Calls just work - "Same Room" prevents dreaded audio feedback when some people are in the same physical room.
- Celebrate with ✋ High-Five (TM) and 🚀 Emoji rockets.
- Get in touch quickly with 👋 Waves, DMs, and ⏰ Notify when free.
- Instant interactive screen share - see your teammates cursors and point things out.
And you can indeed use Tandem to replace Meet/Zoom (or integrate!):
- Calls scale to 30 participants
- Multi-platform (mac, windows, linux, iOS, Android)
- Virtual backgrounds + blur
- For scheduled meetings, Tandem can launch Meet/Zoom and you'll still have the Presence and visibility of Tandem calls.
You can see our distilled thoughts on the Virtual Office and Presence here: https://blog.tandem.chat/the-vir...
Sign up for free and trial Tandem with your team at http://tandem.chat —
We've made Tandem free for teams under 10!
Your feedback has made Tandem great, and is what will make it even better. Please tell us what you think! 🙏
-Rajiv
@bernatfortet@iambetaful@rajiv_ayyangar Hi y'all! Tandem looks very compelling. Kind of a random question if you don't mind sharing. Who made your promo video?
Hi @rajiv_ayyangar and all the team!
We've been using Tandem since almost you started and I'm impressed on how critical it has been for the team to work efficiently.
The other impressive thing is how fast the product evolves and I can't wait to try 2.0.
Congrats!
We've been using Tandem at Wego Technologies for over 6 months ago and it is a phenomenal way to quickly talk with coworkers and have some of that much missed small talk. Couldn't recommend it more!
@aguilaair_tech Thanks for the kind words Eduardo! Would you be up to join us on a user interview? Also, you might like our new feature "Tables". You can activate it in your team settings + scroll to the bottom.
Hi PH! I'm personally very excited to show off what we've been working on over the past few months. Team tables has been an especially fun new project as we try to re-think what working together virtually should look like. Being able to quickly talk and then go back to working has been great for our team's productivity, and we're excited to share it with your team as well. Special thanks to Rajiv and Bernat for being awesome partners on the journey.
If you never used Tandem do it right now! It is like being at the office but you are at home. What I like the most :
- "wave" 👋 at other to seek help without disturbing them
- it is sooooo easy to share your screen with others to seek help or demonstrate something
- high fives are sooo satisfying
Great job @rajiv_ayyangar and the team
@davej thanks! Team communication has to be so reliable - like getting water from a faucet. It’s not always easy but we’ve got a stellar team and it’s worth the work 🙏
@davej We're so glad you noticed all the improvements! Over the last year we built our own AV stack and infrastructure and have been quietly rolling it out to our users :)
I ❤ Tandem. So optimized for work it's lovely. Also the only video / audio software that works when 2 of us are in the same room (it auto adjusts and cancels out background noise and that odd screech and echo that usually happens).
Amazing product for remote or hybrid teams, we have been using it for more than a year and a half, at first only within Product and Tech Team. We choose to expand to the whole company when remote was made compulsory, and it helped us so much communicating ! Thanks Tandem 🖐💙
@charlotte_bar So glad to hear! We often do find the Product or Engineering teams start with Tandem, then spread it to other groups. It's helpful to know this was the case with Sybel! 🙌
@rajiv_ayyangar Rajiv, I just love cool products like Tandem! You are inspiring me=) Really. I'm following you for a long time.
We are going to launch on Product Hunt when we have the first 30-40 paying customers. I think it will be in a few months.
@rajiv_ayyangar Thank you, Rajiv! I really appreciate it! 🙏🙂
You can join the Beta list on https://getlanding.io. I will send an email about our launch.
We've been using Tandem for over year and honestly I don't know how we could live with out it as a remote team. I'm super impressed with the product y'all have built and can't wait so see what you ship next.
@rajiv_ayyangar I applaud you for keeping up the grind while being in this ruthless, saturated, and bigco-dominated space. I'm curious what keeps you going?
I have been in this space (and I think I know it pretty well) and my big learning is that new features don't drive sustainable growth with minimal churn. At Facemoji (20 ppl, multiple timezones, 100% remote), we use a combination of Slack/Discord/Zoom/Google Meet/Telegram/WhatsApp and we all hate this fragmentation across apps but we're not gonna switch because of high-fives, rooms, or instant interactive screen share. I don't know what will make us switch tbh... Zoom has great quality/performance, Slack is great at async, Telegram, and WhatsApp are great on mobile... you know? We want to streamline this, but haven't seen a reason/ammunition to sell this to others yet that would be truly 10X our flow and fix the fragmentation problem.
Obviously, humans are fundamentally wired to hate changes if they don't understand... and I feel like nobody is realllllly, truly focused on that (given the current market landscape) even though there seems to be a new entrant into this space every week and others adding/cluttering existing UI with more features—which only leads to being disrupted later with an Apple-simplistic product that feels fresh bc of simple UX.
How do you make this cohort (I believe it's a big one) of companies switch to something new? 🤔
@robinraszka amazing question. tldr: we earn the switch through relentless iteration + innovation. We started with a simple thesis: if we focus on internal, realtime communications, increase Presence, and drastically remove Friction, we'll give teams what they're looking for: the feeling of working together, even more so than in an office.
In practice, this isn't enough. You need to remove the blockers to switching (e.g. build parity with Meet/Zoom in reliability, virtual backgrounds, cross-platform support, calendar/meeting integrations, mobile support), and also make the new experience so good, for everyone on the team, that even the skeptics switch. It's a high bar, but for many companies, we're clearing it. And we're just getting started.
We've prototyped ways to collaborate that feel 100x better than in-person, but are too radical or confusing to be widely adopted. As we push further into presence and reducing friction, pretty soon it will seem absolutely insane to the whole world that we once used clunky conference calls to talk with teammates. Without the virtual office, you'll feel slow, blind, and alone.
In other words: We've seen the future, and our early teams have seen it too, and that inspires us to make it happen in a way that everyone, at every company, can benefit from.
@rajiv_ayyangar Thanks for taking the time to respond :) I think it's a good pitch, but I struggle to imagine how this mindset might actually convert e.g. you basically have ~1 min to convince a new user TO give it a few more minutes. Most people entering the new user funnel won't even get so far in the journey to appreciate your "relentless iteration + innovation"—which is great, I applaud you for that, if you can keep it going for years, you will eventually make it in this state or totally different iteration of the product, I'm sure of that.
Less friction, virtual backgrounds, calendar/meeting integrations, mobile support—feature parity—are mirages and time suck e.g. Zoom has a UI that didn't change since the launch... inviting people is a pain, and yet, people are still using it...
I'm convinced you need to break the mold (dramatically) to get attention because no avg. user will understand why this is 10X better in the first minute vs. all the others in the space screaming for attention. If you have seen the future—as you say—why not build it? Why not go radical (but usable) for "radicals" instead of those looking for feature parity? How else do you stand out? What's the Cybertruck version of Tandem? Can't see it, yet 😬
@robinraszka you should try Tandem for a day and see! It is quite radical!
I hear you on the impatience of new users, but I'm a big believer in solving for sustained value first, then making the onboarding as quick and easy as possible. We had a big uptick last PH launch, but it took a lot of effort to make Tandem something teams actually *live* in, and I'm glad we prioritized that!
@rajiv_ayyangar We tried, and slowly churned back to Zoom...
Been trying all the new shiny things... they all have 2 views and the same UI paradigms: a buddy list and a meeting view with different level of clutter e.g. modals sprinkled on top of it. Not one is making the jump from rotary phones to multi-touch 😅 The space kinda looks like this:
https://twitter.com/Kristennette...
@robinraszka have you tried it with your full team? anytime in the last few months? As I recall you didn't give it a proper trial! (e.g. switch your meetings to Tandem for a few days and get the whole team onboard).
Curious what we could do to make a full-team trial easier!
very cool update -- big fan of what you've been working on. LOVE the focus on adhoc, presence, and the entire idea of being able to work more fluidly with your coworkers
if only google would consider adopting this tool so I could use it at work...
Reviewpad has been using Tandem for 8 months and it has changed the way we work as a 100% remote company. It's like working on a virtual office, we see who's in the office, who's in virtual rooms or private conversations, and we can join them, like in a real office. Talking to a person is one click away, and the screen sharing with other people's pointers is awesome. And, of course, the high five :D
@adrianomartins gotta love that high-five! Awesome to hear it's changed how you work. In particular being able to *see* who's talking is something I personally think is really powerful - it's like being in a "Glass office" - it provides the energy, buzz, and awareness of your team!
Tandem is one of the most indispensable tools we use for remote work, alongside G-Suite and Slack.
My distributed startup team at EV Life has used Tandem since before COVID. Remotely, it is the closest thing I've experienced to sitting in a room with a teammate to collaborate on a big project for hours or tap someone's shoulder to get 2 minutes of quick feedback.
We've been using Tandem for over a year, and have found it essential for quick collaboration, for our chattier teams to work well together seamlessly and to help the company as a whole feel less lonely.
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