OnAir 的呼叫链接上线即登 HN 首页，却迟迟找不到客户

做的是什么生意

OnAir sells web-based calling links: a customer opens onair.io/yourname in a browser and rings a sales or support person, with round-robin routing, lead capture, call recording and transcription behind each link, priced per user with a 7-day free trial.

启动资金：Bootstrapped; the founders described it as an 'indie hacker-ish' product built by a team that already ran its own SaaS.

起因

In the Show HN post, founder bigmicro explained the origin: one of the team's SaaS products was struggling to grow, and they believed more 'hand holding' — letting visitors speak to a real person before buying, like the guy behind the counter — would raise conversion. That experiment became OnAir. The team built the first version on Agora (which they called 'a nightmare') and rebuilt on LiveKit before launch, adding iOS/Android apps, online/offline/scheduled availability synced with Google Calendar, and an email-signature presence badge.

经过

The 2024-11-15 launch hit the HN front page: 263 points, 106 comments, and the founder answering calls for eight hours. Praise for the UX came with sharp pushback on positioning: the assumed e-commerce customer asked 'why use this instead of a WhatsApp button?'; sales teams wanted Gong/Salesforce integration, CNAME support and a phone number; a commenter called the pricing page misleading ($9/month was actually per user), and the page was changed that day. Commenters pointed to rep.ai, whereby, Jitsi and Google Meet links as existing substitutes. The founder kept iterating in the thread — testing a LiveKit-based AI agent as offline backup — and was candid that 'identifying the perfect use case / customer has not been easy'.

可借鉴之处

首页关注证明了机制，而非市场：OnAir 的上线备受赞誉，但其预期的电商客户问为何不用 WhatsApp——切入点在公开场合不得不重新寻找。