3 lessons from Ayush Ranjan, CEO & Co-Founder of Huddle01

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A few days ago, I chatted with Ayush Ranjan, CEO & Co-Founder of Huddle01 - a project many people think is just a web3 Zoom alternative.

But it's much more than that. Of course, you can token-gate your meetings, have all meetings encrypted by design, and can store them via Filecoin. But you can also integrate audio/video chats to your apps via their SDK. And they're working on a Real-Time Communications protocol that will be a game changer for millions of people around the world.

Three things I found the most interesting about our conversation:

1) If you want to build a tool for crypto-native people, go all the way.

They integrated login with MetaMask, and it helped a lot. But adding OpenSea API that fetched your NFTs so you could use them as your pfp during the meeting was a real game changer. And now they want to add even more crypto-native features.

2) To keep themselves focused on rapid shipping, they attended hackathons.

It sounds counter-intuitive since hackathons are typically pretty chaotic, but having tight deadlines helped them to ship new features to the first Huddle01 version.

3) Competing in online meetings space is hard, so you need to work on bundling.

Everyone knows that Zoom's UX is better than Microsoft Teams. But Teams is much more popular since they're added for free to MS Office. That's why Huddle01 is forming a coalition with other projects so that you can get the whole package - calendar, video meetings, chat, etc.

If you'd like to listen to the episode, here's the link: