Coffee Chats

Create a website to host free or paid chats

12 followers

Create a website to host free or paid chats

12 followers

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Coffee Chats is an all-in-one website, scheduling, and payments platform that allows anyone to easily host and monetize coffee chats, coaching sessions, and more! Built by Compound Choice.

Free

Launch tags:Events•Coffee•Calendar

Launch Team

Wispr Flow: Dictation That Works EverywhereStop typing. Start speaking. 4x faster.

Promoted

Coffee Chats

Maker

Hi Product Hunters! After a year of solo-building this project in my free time, I’m excited to finally share Coffee Chats with you all! In June 2020, I launched Coffee Chats to help people connect over virtual coffee chats during COVID. Over the past year, I’ve evolved Coffee Chats based on feedback, and today, I’m excited to finally share Coffee Chats (https://www.trycoffeechats.com) with PH: a no-code platform that lets you build a website that connects with your Google Calendar so you can easily host free or paid virtual coffee chats, meetings, consulting calls, etc. without writing any code (think Calendly meets Carrd in one app starting at $0/mo). Why Coffee Chats? Two coffee chats fundamentally changed my life. - One was catching up with a friend in 2012 and asking her if she could bring a mutual friend out for drinks the next day. I had a crush on that mutual friend for years, and surprisingly, she showed up for drinks. Fast forward a year later, we were dating. Fast forward, 6 years later, and we were married. Fast forward to today, and we're expecting our son in just a few weeks! - The other was also in 2012 with a coworker who I didn't really work with, but we shared similar interests. Through monthly coffee chats, we became good friends always pushing each other to do more to help the world. In 2019, he helped me get my job at Google, but in 2020, he passed away. Though I miss him every day, I'm eternally grateful for the wisdom he shared over our cups of coffee. So with those two coffee chats in mind, I've been personally blessed and understand how a simple coffee chat can change your life. Then, COVID hit. Everyone went inside, and in-person coffee chats vanished. And I was sitting at home one weekend watching the world change, and I decided to build an MVP of a virtual coffee chat platform, and Coffee Chats was born. How does it work? 🖥 Build a website: Sign in with Google to start building your website. A Gmail account is required because Coffee Chats connects with your GCal to show when you’re free on the calendar that’s built into your site. 💅 Personalize your site with the no-code editor: Coffee Chats has an easy-to-use no-code editor that allows you to customize text, links, colors, and fonts on your site. If you want to add custom HTML/CSS, you can upgrade to Premium (more on that below). 💰 Connect with Stripe (optional): If you want to charge for chats, connect your site with Stripe. If you already have a Stripe account, just login with your existing Stripe login and you’re set. After this is complete, set your rate and you can start receiving money for your chats. This is great if you want to turn your chats into a side hustle or you want to use the funds to donate to passion projects and/or charities that you support. 👋 Share your new website: With your site set up, share your new site with your friends, network, mentees, followers, and/or clients. They can book time with you using your site and you can say goodbye to all the back-and-forth emails. It's completely free to create a site with Coffee Chats and you’ll get your own SSL’d website (e.g. .trycoffeechats.com). If you want to add your own custom domain or waive the 5% transaction fee for paid chats, you can upgrade to Premium for starting at just $8/mo with the ability to cancel any time. Lastly, I just want to say that building Coffee Chats over the past year has felt like finishing my self-created programming course because, as someone who started teaching himself to code in 2016 with cheap online classes and Michael Hartl's Ruby on Rails book, I never would have thought I could build a website as a service product that supports a wildcard SSL's domains for the free tier, custom domain using the Heroku API for premium, the Stripe API to handle subscriptions and charging for chats, the Shopify Liquid engine to create the no-code website editor, and the Google Cal API to handle creating and scheduling events. And though I wrote the majority of the code base on my own, this would not be possible without the engineering mentors who helped me along the way so a huge thanks to Shane, Cam, Sami, Julian, and Eli. If you made it this far, thanks for reading my story, and I appreciate any feedback on Coffee Chats! Also, if you’d ever like to have a coffee chat time with me, you can use this link with a promo code applied on my site which will waive the $10 charge for the first 10 people use it: https://chris.trycoffeechats.com...

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5yr ago

Helpdesk by LabiDesk

@chptung Great initiative and great project! Congrats 🚀

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5yr ago

@chptung Deeply moved by your share about your two life-changing chats. Thank you!

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5yr ago

Coffee Chats

Maker

@bochkovaleks Thanks for the kind words!

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5yr ago

Coffee Chats

Maker

@followflavius Thank you. If you told me then that those two cups of coffee would change my life, I never would have believed you, but I'm so glad I went and caught up with those two friends.

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5yr ago

LLC Toolkit

@chptung Nice, this is what today's version of Eventbrite should be!

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5yr ago

Spark'n

Love Carrd. Like Calendly. Need this solution now... aye! Will be purchasing for a team member. Do you have any api capabilities? (Ie Integromat?)

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5yr ago

Coffee Chats

Maker

@snakecharmer Thank you for the kind words 🙏 I don't have it yet but I can look into it. I've never built an external API for a project before but I've also never built a website as a service until Coffee Chats so there's a first time for everything.

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5yr ago

Okay so I'm not really sure about something. Coffee Chats allows you to create your own website... and adding chats if you take the premium version? Anyway it does look interesting, and your storytelling is great, which makes me want to try it even more haha

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5yr ago

Coffee Chats

Maker

@rubenwolff So this tells me I need to work on the marketing messaging. To clarify, Coffee Chats allows you to create your own website and book free or paid coffee chats completely for free. But, if you upgrade to Premium, you can connect your own custom domain (e.g. ruben.com), transaction fees for paid coffee chats are reduced to 1%, and you unlock other benefits like custom questions. Hope that makes more sense!

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5yr ago

Product Hunt

@chptung Congratulations on the launch! So amazing to see the simplicity of it. Website, payment integration, and scheduling, all at one place!!! I couldn't have asked for more :) I vibe with the ~Edinburgh~ template. So cool 😍

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5yr ago

Coffee Chats

Maker

@adityavsc Thank you for the support! Edinburgh and Tokyo are my favorite. Currently rocking Tokyo on my site: https://chris.trycoffeechats.com/

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5yr ago

Product Hunt

@chptung So smooth! I have to confess one thing, your calendar gives me anxiety 😂

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5yr ago

Coffee Chats

Maker

@adityavsc Haha yes...part of the reason why I built Coffee Chats is because I wanted to help people over virtual chats but coordinating time was pretty...tough. But those 1pm-1:30pm slots are open 💀

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5yr ago

Product Hunt

@chptung the grind is REAL!! 🤘

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5yr ago

I saw some of the demos. Simple but works! I tried to book a demo and realized that it requires a Google login. I would prefer to use an email instead. Another thing, for $8 a month which is similar to what Calendly and other booking apps charges, I don't like that it still takes 1% for bookings. I think it'll convert more if you take away the transaction fee. All the best for your launch! :)

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5yr ago

Coffee Chats

Maker

@ken_moo Thanks for the feedback, Ken! I think what makes it slightly different than Calendly is that you can also connect a custom domain (e.g. ken.com) and you can add in your own custom HTML and scripts when you pay $8/mo, which I don't think Calendly provides yet? But I hear you on the feedback and if I can find a way scale without the 1% fee on Premium I'd love to be able to.

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5yr ago

Used this to book a coffee chat with Chris, and it was seamless and super easy! Eliminated the back-and-forth difficulties surrounding scheduling. 10/10 product :)

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5yr ago

Coffee Chats

Maker

@jennifer_frey Thank you Jennifer! Wishing you all the best :)

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5yr ago

I've been using Coffee Chats since the early days. Love that it's always been just-enough software to solve my problems, not enough to get in the way.

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5yr ago

Coffee Chats

Maker

@joshua_herzig_marx Thanks Josh. I seriously couldn't have done this without you. Thanks for being one of my early alpha users.

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5yr ago

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