This review from a product owner perspective

Let's face it, "work" has changed completely. Daily commutes are drastically reduced, hours spent in the office are down, and leaving our dogs while we hit up meetings are becoming a thing of the past. It all seems amazing until we start to realize we've introduced more issues.

How do we get feedback quickly? How do I interact with my counterparts? Who ARE my counterparts now that I haven't seen them in over a year? The new distributed workforce is here to stay, which means we have to solve the problems that come with it.

A large company in my area requires that the entire teams stay on Zoom calls all day. Literally ALL day long Zoom calls. I can't tell you how fast I would quit if I were in this scenario, and I'm sure that I'm not alone. We as managers, employers, and founders need to be able to allow autonomy within our teams while also providing means to quickly communicate without feeling like an all-seeing eye.

TMate attempts to help with this problem, unfortunately, they have a ways to go.

What we liked

• the idea. I really like the idea. Simple audio chat with a group of people but browser-based. My biggest complaint with Clubhouse was that it was strictly mobile-based. I hated it.
• The fact that it's strictly browser-based. You don't share your entire desktop, only the browser that your team is collaborating on.
• Their focus. TMate doesn't seem to be interested in integrating with all the other tools out there, rather they seem to focus on being a simple tool that overlays with all the other tools out there. Simplicity...we like it.

What we didn't like

• A lot. This app is unfortunately extremely buggy. I'm going to list them out to help the TMate team identify, replicate, and hopefully fix.
• Step 2 of account creation. I think this was the "create a workspace" page. After submitting the form, the page load dragged. I had to refresh the form to get to the next step.
• Step 3 (I think?) after submitting the form to invite teammates, the page went white. I didn't check the console but now I'm wishing I had
• No one on the team received an invite to the workspace
• A modal appears to ask me to download the chrome extension. I was presented with the option to say "not now". When I did that, I white screened again and despite refreshing the page multiple times, I was presented with no way to navigate back.
• I closed the browser tab, and went to the home page to start again but I had no way to sign in, only sign up. I clicked "Get started now" and white screened again.
• I went incognito and was able to get to the dashboard after manually guessing the /admin path.
• I was finally able to "Go Live" which may be a good experience but I wasn't able to test because no one on my team received an email to join. I can invite people to my channel but only teammates in my workspace can join...which is impossible if they didn't get an email.

Unfortunately, we have to give TMate a pretty low score but we encourage them to reapply after they've addressed some bugs. I think this market is really wide open and will continue to grow.

TMate gets a score of 57%:

• Originality: 6
• Product Market Fit: 7
• Message Clarity: 8
• Total Addressable Market: 7
• UI: 7
• Ease of Use: 3
• Execution: 2