Doug Safreno

Learn how to schedule calendar video conferences in Pragli that guests can join without becoming members of your Pragli team.

How to Host Calendar Meetings in Pragli

Vivek Nair

I’m a co-founder of Pesto, a virtual office for remote teams. In this post, I
describe Pesto’s empty room problem and how we built a game into Pesto to solve
it. 

The empty room problem

Currently, the largest issue that we face with product adoption is a problem
that all communication products face, the empty room problem. Here's the most
common user behavior in Pesto:

 1. Users join Pesto for the first time
 2. They create their avatars
    [https://pragli.com/blog/live-avatars-with-faceapi-js/]
 3. They join a few audio channels to understand the conversation mechanics
 4. They exit the product without inviting any teammates

You need two to tango with any communication product. But, it's a frustrating
chicken and egg problem. Users don't get the full product value in an empty
virtual office, yet there's too much friction in inviting someone to the team
unless you give more upfront value in return.

There are two general approaches to solving this problem - improving the
single-player experience, and improving our users’ invite rate. We invested in
the latter by adding invitation callouts throughout the product and sending
periodic email updates. They certainly helped to reinforce the product in users'
minds, but they weren't resulting in massive increases in invitations.

Attempt #1: Different Invitation CalloutsAttempt #2: Email UpdatesDeciding to
build a trivia game to improve single-player mode

Doug and I spent several hours brainstorming out-of-the-box ways to add more
value to the empty office experience in Pragli.

We decided that adding an interactive game built into an audio channel could be
a great way for a solo user to engage more with the product. Here's our
rationale - if you can't give users value immediately, put them in a position
where they can at least get some type of value, even if the value that you give
feels like a deviation from the core product feature set.

Moreover, the #1 problem in remote work is loneliness, and teams really struggle
with building closeness. We thought this could potentially help teams build
camaraderie.

We evaluated the types of games that would make the most sense for these goals.
Some characteristics that were important to us:

 1. Easy to build (this is just an experiment after all...)
 2. Easy to understand game mechanics for non-gamers
 3. Fun to play both as a single player and with teammates
 4. Promotes bonding with teammates

With these constraints, we evaluated a few different game types:

Snake: A multiplayer snake game
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snake_(video_game_genre)] is pretty easy to
understand and relatively easy to scale to several people.

Examples of different Snake versionsBut, we had concerns about game latency since keystrokes would naturally need to
be published faster as the game becomes more difficult (the snake moves faster).

Collectible avatars: If you don't know already, Doug and I created customizable
avatars [https://pragli.com/blog/live-avatars-with-faceapi-js/] as a way of
creating presence with your team in Pesto. We thought that rewarding users with
random collectible avatars for certain accomplishments (like starting a
conversation in Pesto) could be a great way to push users to invite their
teammates.

Example Bob Marley avatarBut, collectible avatars seemed to make the most sense when you could share them
with your teammates, who were already within the product. The single player
version didn't seem very fun.

Trivia: The mechanics of trivia are dead simple to understand. You get a point
for every correct answer and the questions cycle every 15 seconds. Given that
there are a ton of open source trivia questions, we knew that we wouldn't have
to invest much into question creation. We also knew that the single player
experience was super fun and could easily scale to many people without much
technical difficulty.

On top of that, we could easily see teammates chatting/laughing/bragging about
the trivia questions that they did or didn't know.

Decision: We settled on building a trivia game. The game checked all the boxes,
and I was excited to build it.

How I built trivia into Pesto

Our process was straightforward. I started designing the UI and UX in Figma,
making sure that the game mechanics felt right. Also, I put significant effort
into making sure that the game interaction did not negatively affect the
existing conversation mechanics.

You can view my design assets for the game in Figma below.



One important consideration when designing the application was ensuring the
quality of the questions. A trivia game can only be as good as the questions
that are asked. Luckily, I found that Open Trivia Database
[https://opentdb.com/] had thousands of curated open source questions,
filterable by category and difficulty. With a single API request, I could easily
create hundreds of trivia questions.

I used the same technology stack to build the trivia game as our core product,
Firebase and React. The publish/subscribe mechanics of Firebase Realtime
Database made it dead simple to update every player’s game state. I invested
roughly half a day to implement the game and squash any bugs that shook out from
testing.

Once I built out the main features of the game, I added a bunch of supplementary
features to increase user engagement. Here are a few examples:

 * A leaderboard to introduce healthy competition
   

Unfortunately, Vivek beat me on that game... * A “Game refresh” button to allow
   new teammates to more easily join the channel and participate in existing
   games
   

 * A “Start next question” button to cycle through questions faster when playing
   as a single player
   

With those features completed, I put the game through some testing, squashed a
few more bugs, and pushed the game to production.

Here's what the finished product looks like! 

Final Result: Starting triviaFinal Result: Multiple players with a leaderboard
Final Result: Selecting correct answersFeature Roadmap

If our users fall in love with the game, we will definitely need to add a few
more critical features:

 1. Filtering questions by difficulty
 2. Filtering questions by category (e.g. I would prefer to filter out the board
    games category since I rarely ever play them)
 3. Giving awards, such as stickers for your avatar, for winning games

Concluding thoughts

Building trivia into Pesto was a super fun exercise and a great break from the
daily rollercoaster of startup life. I’m excited to see what the reception is
for our latest experiment and figure out whether the game produces any
meaningful engagement wins.

Either way, I’ll update this post with any interesting insights and comments
from our user base. Stay tuned!

Interested in Pesto?

If you are interested in trying out Pesto to play a game of trivia or to
communicate better with your remote team (¿por que no los dos?), visit pesto.app
[https://pesto.app/] to sign up and create a team.

You can create a trivia channel by pressing the + button in the Channels section
and selecting Trivia Channel as the channel type.

Also, if you have any questions or suggestions for Pragli, feel free to email me
at vivek@pesto.app or direct message me on Twitter, @virtuallyvivek
[https://twitter.com/virtuallyvivek].

Why I built a game into our B2B product

You already use Pesto for internal communication, but what about when you need
to talk to someone outside your organization? Or what about cross-team meetings
with someone who isn’t on Pesto?

In this article, I explain how to schedule calendar video conferences in Pesto
that anyone can join without becoming a member of your Pesto team.

Option 1 (preferred): Use the Scheduler
If you use Google Calendar with Chrome, our Scheduler makes scheduling meetings
incredibly.

First, install the extension
[https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/pragli-scheduler-for-goog/ggglnbijagalkldjkgjnanbjpnkpmphh]
.

Then, click the "Add Pesto" button to schedule a meeting (you may get a sign in
prompt the first time).

That's it! Everyone will be able to click the link to join, including guests.

Check out our notes about guests at the bottom 👇.

Option 2: Generate and paste the link
Getting a room link
First, you need a room where your meeting is going to take place. You may
already have one, like Stand up for your daily standup, or you may need to
create one. For example, I personally use Doug's Office to host 1 on 1 meetings
with people outside of Pesto.

Once you’ve created the room, grab the room link by clicking the link icon on
the right edge of the channel.

Create the meeting
Paste the link into your calendar event in the “where” field and add the
relevant people per usual.

Join the meeting
Click on the meeting link to join the meeting. If you have the desktop app,
Pesto automatically opens the link in the desktop app.

Notes about guests
Guests can only see the room
Guests join without being able to see the whole team. Below, you can see the
view from a full member's perspective (top) versus a guest's perspective
(bottom).

You can promote guests to members
Guest attendees can request full team access by clicking on the blue button - a
full member will have to confirm them.

If you have any issues or questions, please follow up with me at doug@pesto.app

Sign up now [https://pesto.app/signin] to try out Pragli for both your virtual
office and external video conferencing - it's free!

How to host calendar meetings in Pesto

Option 1 (preferred): Use the Scheduler

Option 2: Generate and paste the link

Getting a room link

Create the meeting

Join the meeting

Notes about guests

Guests can only see the room

You can promote guests to members

Why I built a game into our B2B product