JVillella

Was curious if anyone had attempted such endeavour. The use case I see is you input your finances (eg. money spread over different investments, in a business, multiple incomes, etc.) and your goal (purchase home that costs $x) and an optimizer will try different solutions (eg. sell these assets for this tax liability, take this mortgage at this rate, pay it in lump sums to be able to withdraw assets from your business as dividends spread over N years, etc.)

Hi HN, sharing a tool we built to make it easy for people to make their everyday purchases from independent and local merchants:

https://shopboreal.com

We've only been out for a month, but have helped over 2k business get online customers.

This product isn't for everyone, but our goal is to make buying local as convenient as Amazon. Then over time, offer further benefits as these local businesses provide a massive distributed fulfillment center we can build on top of for fast delivery.

Check it out, would love your feedback!

Hi HN!

I've been dealing with banks, telehealth, and CRA a ton these days over the phone. I guess a lot of others have too since the hold times have been ridiculous. I built a little tool that waits on hold on my behalf and calls me when an agent is on the other line. It's saved me some time so I thought I'd share it with others: https://youcallme.io

I generated a few quick access pages for the worst offenders too: e.g. https://youcallme.io/wayfair https://youcallme.io/chase-bank https://youcallme.io/jetblue-airways https://youcallme.io/walmart and a bunch others.

Would love to hear if you find it useful for yourself

Couldn't deal with waiting on hold anymore during coronavirus - seems like every customer service has > 30 minute hold times.

So I made myself a sort of client-side phone callback system: https://youcallme.io.

It initiates a conference call with you and the customer service line letting you enter the DTMF tones. Then you hang up while it waits for a human to be detected. Have been playing with a few different human detection approaches from call screening to a bit of ML. Once detected calls you back to join the conference.

So far has saved me 45 minutes with Questrade and 2 hours with CRA (Canada's IRS).

Hi HN, I'm been thinking about this a lot these days while working on https://meetfromhome.io and well... I'd love to hear other people's opinions outside of my personal echo chamber.

w/ COVID forcing events to go online I've been intrigued on how their format may play out. I consider a conference primarily composed of content and networking.

content: who's going to sit watching 3x12 hours of video at home? I don't think that's effective. Before, our schedule would be put on pause and adapt to fit the conference's schedule, but when going online, the reverse would happen - we'd experience the conference on our own time. My gut tells me we'll start seeing more short online events (e.g. 1-2 hour "webinars"), or we'll see conferences get spread out over time as (pre-recorded?) videos.

networking: this one I'm mostly at a loss with. A lot of folks like https://www.ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2020/6/4/solving-online-events share the opinion that online events will get unbundled - in which case perhaps networking would be stand-alone. If that's the case, would we still have networking at an online conference? Or would it be more about community building that happens async?

I've been thinking about event networking as 1) being available, 2) there being the intent to network. Looking at networking sites like LinkedIn, people aren't really "available" and the intent to "network" isn't so much there - so interactions don't really happen - and when they do, they're seen as cold calling. But perhaps, these communities would be things like slack workspaces, discord servers, etc. - but personally I don't feel that scratches the itch. Other people have tried 1:1 matchmaking (e.g. hopin.to or runtheworld.today - it feels unnatural.

Anyways, curious to hear people's thoughts on this problem - if we unbundle online conferences / events - what would the format of content be? what would networking look like?

Hello HN, my name is Julian and I hate "waiting for the next available agent". Last year I started my first business and found myself dealing with the CRA (that's Canada Revenue Agency for the non-Canadians amongst us) fairly often as we were learning some of the ropes in filing corporate taxes. Nearly every call was at least an hour on hold. I asked the CRA to implement a callback service. Needless to say they didn't, so I built youcallme (http://youcallme.io) to solve this problem for myself.

The way it works is you enter in the phone number you want to call on the web tool and you receive a phone call as soon as the next agent is available. If there is a pre-recorded menu system we do speech-to-text to display the options as text messages you can respond to over chat.

Behind the scenes our system is making the call on your behalf and waiting on hold until an agent comes available. We're able to detect when it's a human on the other line before calling you. We've tested this tool on hundreds of phone numbers and it seems to work quite well.

I feel like I have a new "hammer" in hand and it's been fun using it for other phone calls I (and my friends) have had to make recently (e.g. telehealth: 2+ hours on-hold during the COVID-19 outbreak; bell: 40+ min; and other customer support companies, etc).

I thought I should share my solution with others, so I am launching youcallme: a service to make it so you never have to wait on hold again. I'm very keen on hearing if this is a frustration for others and esp. business who this may cost money (anecdote: my wife's work hired an intern to call our city's courthouse since wait times could be up to an entire day for the filing departments).

If you feel this service would be useful to you or just have thoughts on how we can make this a more useful tool, please reach out! We're eager to get the community's input, in the comments below, registering on our page, or contacting us at contact@youcallme.io

Seems DeepFakes have been getting growing attention in the media for their use in comedy, while also giving glimpse of potential danger in "fake news". I'm curious if folks have come across any positively impactful uses (or have heard of any)?