Hi, Taishi here. How have you been?
For the past few months, I’ve been trying to launch a startup in Vancouver.
And the idea I am thinking of is the “virtual co-working space” concept.
I am validating this idea with a platform called Pragli as an MVP.
I am talking about it on a Japanese podcasting platform, so please give it a listen if you are interested in👍
Because of COVID-19, I feel there are so many chat platforms are coming to the market.
This is some example.
All of these look so fun and interesting!
I wanna build an online community tool
I love making a place you can belong to online such as a social network service.
I think Pragli is very good, it’s a great tool for work just like Slack, but with game-like avatars to show off the users and create a more community feel.
Pragli is progressive
On the other hand, as you can see when you use it, it’s quite quirky. For example, when you enter a room, the microphone automatically turns to sound. Why, in my case, I had to go to the trouble of manually setting it to Mute every time. I think most people are still resistant to having their sound leaking out to the other person all the time or something like that. Even in a real coworking space, just because you walk into a certain room doesn’t mean you’re always going to talk to the people in there.
Pragli is pretty unique.
It’s a challenge to get users to keep the app open at all times as you can imagine…
I keep the Pragli desktop app open all the time.
That’s how I’ve noticed that the app is pretty heavy. That makes my PC run slow. I wish it was as light as Discord or Telegram.
I had a fun experience with the virtual co-working space
On the other hand, it was a lot of fun to video chat with people I barely know.
Coworking space is a space where you see people every day but you’ve never talked to them before, so I think it was fun to realize that at Pragli this time as well.
I had a late-night video chat with them. It was fun.
Some people said that just displaying the avatars of people online gave them a sense of security, like a sense of security that people were there, and they liked that kind of loose atmosphere.
I agree with that.
I came up with the idea of a virtual co-working space in the first place because I was always working from home and I was lonely, lol.
Even if you don’t talk to each other, just knowing that someone else is there can be comforting and inspire you to do your best.
That’s what I felt strongly in this Pragli experiment.
One more week for the experiment
Here is the invitation link for our Pragli!
https://pragli.com/team/virtual-coworking-space/-MHPW5oMkut4w2p8qLN4
Please feel free to talk to me when you join it👨🎤