saturation in the space. “We’re not scared of the completion,” Boyd says. “It didn’t deter us at all from starting this company. If a few people use the app and love it every single day, we’ve won.”
Plus, as the three founders see it, they had a product that wasn’t just a virtual meeting room, but a true virtual office. The point was to add the value of real work-time interaction—-including water cooler conversation and mingling—-even for remote workers. And that really hadn’t been available in the space. “We just wanted to reimagine what group communication and collaboration feels like,” Boyd says.
And they wanted to get it out the door fast.
Boyd and his co-founders started the company in February of 2013, and threw together an Adobe Flash-based prototype in three days. “Then we realized Flash is not the future,” Boyd says. “We don’t want to align ourselves with a dying technology.” Instead, they pivoted to using the newer WebRTC standard for Web-based communications. “It’s great because it’s open-source, and it’s really good for building this thing, but it’s so early it’s a little buggy,” he says. So Sqwiggle’s team of nine is constantly working to push out new versions and correct bugs. But, “every time we push out a release for Chrome it gets better and better.”
Right now, Sqwiggle is both a browser-based services and an app; Chrome users can log in through the site, and there’s a native app available for Mac users. The company is currently working on a Windows version of the app, and expects to release Sqwiggle across all browsers in the near future.
In August, the company raised a seed round of $1.1 million from investors including Atlas Venture, Innovation Works and Ludlow Ventures.
So far, feedback from users has been positive, Boyd says. People tend to get used to the constant photos pretty quickly, and one person even told the company that using the service might enable him to move away from the city he currently works in. Another said that seeing an acquaintance in the same company pop up on his screen “felt remarkably like passing someone in the hallway,” Boyd says. “That’s the interaction we want to capture.”
