Show HN: Robin – OpenTable for your office

https://robinpowered.com/

by zachdunn • 11 years ago

50 30 11 years ago

robinpowered.com

rootedbox• 11 years ago

Seems expensive. Can do the same thing with a shared resource in google calendar.

https://robinpowered.com/blog/how-to-set-up-room-resource-ca...

timcederman3• 11 years ago

I saw your comment and wondered "how expensive could it really be?" - the pricing is just too much. I ran it by our IT team (we're a prime candidate for using a product like this) and they shot it down immediately on price. 15 rooms for $3k/year?

agurkas• 11 years ago

Maybe you need to look for a new job. If your IT doesn't have that in their budget, time to run!

zachdunn4• 11 years ago

Couple perspectives you might find interesting (I say this having to learn the lay of the land over the past year myself):

Most offices are designed with 1 conference room per 10-20 employees. If you have 15 conference rooms you probably have well over 100 employees and many millions in payroll. Those people presumably have many meetings, and the cost of not being able to get their job done is measurable.

Conference rooms can be between 200-300 sq feet, so if you have a 15 of them you're looking at several thousand sq ft on your lease. Depending on where you are in the world, that's probably around $10K/month or so in real estate.

The effective rate is about $17/month/room, which in most cases is tiny compared to the cost of mismanaging office space and productive time above.

pbreit3• 11 years ago

If you have over 5 conference rooms, you can afford $3k/year.

xGrill• 11 years ago

Pricing seems really steep. The analytics seems cool, but nothing really actionable can be done about popular conference rooms once your office is already built out.

Can someone recommend a good tablet setup for this to maybe bring the price of your total conference room "system" down?

groby_b• 11 years ago

I'd hope that the analytics help pinpoint all those cases of people booking a room "just in case" and then not using it.

(In a perfect world, resulting in reduced priority for their requests)

atticoos• 11 years ago

We have some suggestions for setting up tablets at the bottom of this page https://robinpowered.com/room-display

Some customers have been 3D printing their own mounts, which is pretty awesome.

adamvalve• 11 years ago

This looks like something that would have been on Silicon Valley (TV Show)...

NeutronBoy• 11 years ago

It's not a new concept, there are modern offices that use similar systems already. They're great, and just confirms the market for this product.

simonw• 11 years ago

I've seen https://eventboard.io/ in the past, which is basically the same exact kind of product. Similar pricing too.

pbreit3• 11 years ago

How is that?

mmvvaa• 11 years ago

Something tells me it has to do with this -- published at the very same hour: http://techcrunch.com/2015/06/23/envoy-15-million-a16z/#.tkv...

cwilson• 11 years ago

Others in this thread are saying the pricing is too steep or that this seems silly.

After working for the past 6 months in an office with 4 shared conference rooms and around 20 people, I can say with 100% confidence this pricing would have been approved pretty much instantly.

The conference room shuffle was a headache every single day and caused constant distraction and productivity loss. I know plenty of other people at other companies who have reported the same issues with their conference rooms. Hell, even in the Facebook HQ when I've gone in for meetings has had this problem (though their system is already pretty decent from what I can tell).

If you've felt this pain (regardless of how first world it may seem), I think you'd agree.

Personally I'd rather just never have meetings, but that's not always an option =)

prawn• 11 years ago

Product is not for me (private Google calendar covers 7 people and one room well enough), but just wanted to say that your site and app design is really nice. Well done. One of the cleanest-looking I've seen on here in a long time.

Rican72• 11 years ago

Thanks! Our design and product development teams put a lot of time and effort into it. Its important to us.

brazzledazzle• 11 years ago

This looks amazing. Hopefully my boss bites because it looks like it will solve a lot of headaches.

pbreit3• 11 years ago

Looks gorgeous but I wonder how big a deal power is? I suspect many rooms won't have power nearby and recharging every 1-3 days sounds dreary.

zachdunn4• 11 years ago

It's generally not a dealbreaker for most offices. With external battery packs you can get extra days, or you could just get a free standing mount that moves closer to a nearby outlet. Most commercial buildings require power every 8 feet or so on walls, so you're rarely in a power desert.

toomuchtodo• 11 years ago

If you can mount near a switch for a light, you can usually get access to unswitched mains right there (1 hot, 1 neutral wire).

artursapek• 11 years ago

I always have trouble with pricing models like this... how is it 2.5X as expensive to have 3x as many "bookable rooms"? Once you write the software, it's trivial to add more "bookable rooms". Why do you charge so much more for the difference, which really just amounts to a little extra disk space/CPU (not that this is an intensive application to run in either regard anyway).

I guess the reason our industry has gone this way is simply because we know we can get more money from larger companies. That's why you always see these arbitrary limits that correspond in no way whatsoever to the actual cost or value of the product being sold.

zachdunn4• 11 years ago

As much as I love capitalism, there's a few differences as you go up in tiers beyond just room limits. Today the most notable is the ability to manage more than one office location. In time it will will expand since certain things (i.e. SAML, high resolution analytics, audit logs) aren't needed by the typical 5 conference room company. The more stuff you're managing, the more complex the relationships become -- not just an N + 1 operation.

jay_kyburz2• 11 years ago

I think this is a great idea. Congrats guys!

jay_kyburz2• 11 years ago

Just thinking about it more more, there are so many places you could bolt a tablet onto a wall to improve an interface to something.

- think doctor / dentist - think directory to an office building - a doorbell with video conferencing - why not just put a menu on every table in every restaurant.

zachdunn4• 11 years ago

If you've been to LaGuardia, it's basically a sea of iPads: http://www.businessinsider.com/the-ipad-is-a-big-part-of-lag...

Cub3• 11 years ago

Wouldn't it be better to use some sort of proprietary e-ink display for the meeting rooms? Would cut down on the constant tablet charging problem

MetaMonk• 11 years ago

I spoke with one of the devs at a holiday party (Trevor?) and he mentioned there were a bunch of other things that weren't fleshed out yet that might justify the price here later. But yeah, seems expensive.

Show HN: Robin – OpenTable for your office

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