A few months ago Andy and I decided to build something to help newly remote teams stay connected in a world of zoom fatigue, facetime burnout, and hangout exhaustion. Too much live video isn’t a good thing: users tend to subconsciously replicate the traditional office meeting when it comes to video conferences. Hence it’s very easy for people to end up on back-to-back, rambling video calls when working from home.

We believe that holding shorter, time-limited conversations is much less likely to cause fatigue and is much more efficient. So we built a live web-based video platform called Touchbase.team.

Users can easily start a 15 minute live video conversation about a specific topic and invite coworkers by sharing a url. The conversation displays a timer which counts down to zero, at which point the conversation automatically ends. It’s possible to add 5 mins near the end but we find that people do not generally do this (they just talk more quickly). In fact, the average Touchbase conversation is around 7 mins long.

Since we first launched a few months ago, 3,000 teams around the world have tried Touchbase and we’re building a core base of teams that come back every day for a quick catch-up or two. Early users report they feel more spontaneous when it comes to connecting with coworkers and less fatigued.

You are very welcome to try Touchbase with your team and let me know what you make of it. I’m especially interested in any use cases you think would work well.