New Conferencing Service Launched

A conferencing service, Sessions 2.0 has hit Product Hunt today with their relaunch.

Much like Around and other new services that have come to the market, they are aiming at Zoom and Microsoft Teams. In a funny way, by the comparisons made, services like WebEx and GoToMeeting have been made mostly irrelevant in the narrative surrounding conferencing and collaboration today.

A couple of initial observations:

1) There’s a free trial, but looking over the range of options the free trial isn’t going to give you the full experience of what makes Sessions interesting.

2) The offer of a live demo didn’t happen. After five minutes of waiting, I logged off.

3) The comparisons of other services that are features which Sessions replaces is very broad. I’m not sure how many customers of Teams or Zoom are even using Add-ons beyond services like Grain, Otter and the like to record and transcribe or are integrating with Slack or other apps but to demonstrate relevance the Sessions team gets big props.

4) The range of functions being offered addresses the need for a platform that can be both conferencing (calling) and webinar (large audience) has been sought for a few years. It’s why Hoppin did so well during the pandemic as an event platform. In those cases the number of users goes far beyond what Zoom is capable of. While Zoom can stream to YouTube and more, it appears that Sessions has made that function easier, so there’s a chance for the service to gain market share with larger audience focused users.

5) Pricing-it’s clear that Sessions is aiming for multi-user businesses vs the lower end solopreneur market. If anything their feature set lends itself to more towards the enterprise.

Just like my experience with Around, the biggest hurdle is the lack of others knowing it. That keeps down user adoption and viral awareness Given the deep acceptance already of Zoom, Teams, Dialpad Meetings and even the older WebEx, getting conversion will be the hurdle session faces.  But as I’m optimistic, I think it can be done.

P.S. I’d still like to try the live demo.