Product Hunt Daily - The anti-FaceTime

“When life gets busy, I’ve often found myself struggling to maintain meaningful relationships with people who matter to me. Living far away from my close friends and family has often been lonely. And as a startup cofounder, I’m always at work putting out fires (usually one’s that I’ve created), making it hard to make time for calls. Unintentionally, I often neglect the most important part of my life: people.“ - Brian Li, Maker at Glimpse

Glimpse, an app for two-minute, one on one video calls with your friends (and friends of friends) is looking to change that. Li, along with co-founder Helena Merk, built Glimpse in seven days. The first version of the app looked more like Chatroulette, but after Glimpse was rejected from the App store, the founders speculated that building an app that let friends and friends of friends have short video chats might be more valuable. 🙌

The result is a hybrid between quick text messages and one-hour calls — two-minute video calls to quickly say hi. In light of college campuses shutting down around world, the product could also be perfectly timed. 🤳

“We learned just a few hours ago that Duke too would be shifting to a remote campus for the remainder of the semester. It’s frustrating to know that we will miss out on not only the academic but social experience of one of the most formative parts of our lives. Our launch of Glimpse is coincidentally timely. I’m excited to join rooms of my friends who normally would be down the hall and have meaningful conversations. I want an authentic view into my friends’ lives, not the highlight reel of Instagram and FB.” - Mary Gooneratne, an employee at Glimpse, wrote on Product Hunt.

Will people use this instead of FaceTime and texting? Some thoughts from the PH community:

“Investing an entire hour when a friend calls is a lot, so when I’m busy I don’t pick up. That’s led to a few months of no contact…totally on me. But if my friends had sent me a ‘glimpse’ instead, and I knew the call would be two minutes, I would be SO down to take a break from my work.“ - Karthik

“I love the concept of limiting calls to two minutes — absolutely a game changer in terms of efficient communication.” - Lincoln

“Love the idea of catching a glimpse into my friends' life. Definitely neglect a ton of relationships when life gets too busy.” - Eric

Would you use this? Try it out and tell us what you think here.

Test Out Glimpse