crankwheel.com was first indexed by Google more than 10 years ago

CrankWheel comes from a desire to make phone calls a lot more effective. My co-founder @gilsicrankwheel is an old-school salesperson and has driven something like a million miles just to show customers something visually, and we figured there has to be a better way. We envisioned CrankWheel as a screen sharing (or most often, browser tab sharing) tool that would be easy enough to add visual sharing in the middle of a phone call. We also wanted it to be super enterprise friendly, offering white labeling, audit logging, and more. Among things I worked at while I was at Google were WebRTC and things related to the Chrome Extensions platform, and we figured these were platform bits that could really help make such a service. At the same time, it was clear that WebRTC wouldn't be ubiquitous enough for many, many years to use only that as a platform for a screen sharing service that we wanted to make work every single time, on all browsers and devices, without requiring a download. More about our architecture from a recent talk:

Another thing we wanted to fix w.r.t. screen sharing is the infamous "do you see the next slide yet" or "do you see X yet" question. To that end we added a "preview pane" where you can see exactly what your viewer(s) see and when. You can see a demo of it in the video above. We're one of the startups in the small but vibrant Icelandic startup community, and one of very few that have posted here on Product Hunt. Shout out to our Icelandic peeps!! We have a completely free plan for individual use, it offers unlimited one-to-one screen sharing. Our Unlimited and Enterprise plans offer co-branding, unlimited multi-viewer screen sharing, white labelling, audit logging and more. Click through for a special discount for Product Hunters! Please feel free to Ask Me Anything!

One of our most loyal users has asked if I have any invites so he can participate in the discussion, but unfortunately I don't. I figure it doesn't hurt to ask: Does anyone have an invite to spare for @marfapr?

w00t, got my Maker badge for CrankWheel!!

I've spoken with @joisig quite a bit on Twitter, and the team seems great. I think CrankWheel has a huge amount of potential, especially for enterprise sales. Definitely saves downloading software, going to obscure URLs, etc. I think the shared lobby would be an issue for me (forcing an upgrade, which I guess is sensible 😁), plus for a startup it seems to make more sense to VoIP when possible. But it's a neat idea, and one to watch for sure.

Thanks @jakeapeters! You raise an interesting point, and we'd actually really love feedback from the Product Hunt community on whether integrated VoIP and/or an integrated conference line is a must-have addition to this product, or a nice-to-have feature. So far we've focused completely on making the screen sharing itself work perfectly, and our assumption has been that you already have your customer in a phone call or a phone conference (or a VoIP conference), and have suggested that folks use one of the available free conference lines if needed. So what do Product Hunters say: Is integrated calling a must-have for this product?

@joisig For me personally, VoIP would be a must. Just to make my life easier. Even if it's turned off by default, and only enable-able by the presenter. That being said, I think there's room in the market for a simple screen-only product like this that just makes everything super easy—awesome for when you're on a call already and didn't know you'd need to screenshare.

@jakeapeters @joisig Could be a premium feature. Should be easy enough to survey your existing customer base on how they use the product and where they see VoIP fits into the feature set.

@kaigradert @jakeapeters Agreed, it would make sense as a premium feature. We've been very, very careful about adding anything that might make the basic use of CrankWheel more complicated, but this is one feature that would likely not interfere with that.

Hi @joisig, looks great! Will be definitely using it for all our future demo calls with potential clients.

Thanks @chichikid, we tried to design it to be nice for web demos, especially of browser-based software. I outlined some of the principles we think are important for software demos via screen sharing in this Quora answer: https://www.quora.com/What-are-t...

CrankWheel

Insanely simple freemium screen sharing +enterprise features

Insanely simple freemium screen sharing +enterprise features

CrankWheel

Insanely simple freemium screen sharing +enterprise features

Insanely simple freemium screen sharing +enterprise features

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