Hello HN! I’m the founder of Pop (https://pop.com) and formerly the co-founder and CEO of Screenhero. Also on the team are a couple other ex-Slack folks and a former Electron co-maintainer.

Pop is the spiritual successor to Screenhero and strives toward the same goal: making remote work better than working together in the same room. After Slack acquired and subsequently killed Screenhero and after becoming remote workers ourselves, we found that none of the Screenhero copycats were really solving the problem adequately. Some are unstable, some are slow, some have poor UX. We decided to get back into the space and build a product that we like to use, leveraging some of the good ideas we came up with working on Screenhero and Slack.

With Pop, instead of just talking with your coworkers about concepts with words, the shared screen becomes a shared whiteboard for diagrams and flow charts. Instead of barking out line numbers or function names, it’s faster to highlight the line with a mouse. And instead of telling someone what to type, it’s easier to just show them by typing directly in their text editor. You can start a call directly in the app or with the Slack integration “/pop” command and collaborate with coworkers on macOS, Windows, and Linux. Or, if you don’t want to bother someone to download the app, they can join a session via web browser (mobile browsers supported, too!), even without a Pop account.

For now, it’s completely free to use. We plan to always maintain a free version, though for heavier team and enterprise use, we’re looking to start charging soon (servers are very much not free). Once we have revenue, we plan to turn some of our attention to adding more remote office features, like spatial audio and presence, and, more broadly, addressing issues of isolation and loneliness in remote work.

We’ve bootstrapped the company entirely ourselves and are unbeholden to outside investors. Our goal is to build a product that people enjoy using. We’re not looking for an exit; we’ve been through that and know what it’s like (financially great, but emotionally taxing). We want to create an independent and sustainable company where we are happy to work for our entire careers.

Let’s get these out of the way:

1. Yes, we’re building on Electron. Yes, we are aware of the performance tradeoffs, but have decided this is the best choice for us. We’re shipping Windows, Mac and Linux clients along with browsers with a four-person team — it’s the only good way right now to do that without features taking six months. We’ve modified the screen sharing pipeline in Chromium to reduce latency as much as possible, because with interactive screen sharing, milliseconds matter.

2. Yes, the domain was expensive. Roughly $1.5m. We consider it an asset that is unlikely to depreciate significantly. (The domain actually has an interesting history as a failed precursor to Netflix from Ron Howard and Steven Spielberg https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2000/sep/10/internet....)

3. No, our non-compete no longer applies — it expired two years after Slack’s ScreenHero acquisition.

4. Yes, we were originally called Screen.so. It was not a good name (and HN let us know, thanks!) and we are now very happy with Pop.

We’d love you to try Pop and let us know what you think, even and especially if it doesn’t work well for you. The app has gotten exponentially better because our dedicated users tell us about their issues and work with us to get them fixed. And, if you have ideas about how remote work could be more enjoyable, we’re eagerly listening!