App phones people so you can pretend to be their boss
My co-founder and I are entrepreneurs and freelancers with many projects. We made an app to automate phone calls between us to keep ourselves on track, because we often work alone (without a boss). It turns out other freelancers also enjoy talking on the phone too! And want bosses. We now have a wonderful community of "bosses", ranging from designers to programmers to illustrators, and all sorts of entrepreneurs — an immersive theater company founder, and even a pet psychic, are on the network. You never know who you will be connected to.
On the surface it appears to be a pretty straightforward peer-to-peer voice-based accountability app for self-employed freelancers but it's the element of play that makes it so special. It not only connects people randomly through a phone call but whoever is playing the boss can decide to get into their role. "Hello, this is your boss calling. What are you working on? Because, uh, you apparently didn't put a cover sheet on one of your TPS reports." On Cool Tools, she talked about the app's origin story:
"It started out as this joke, as most of my companies do. So, my friend Max Hawkins created this project years ago called, 'Call in the Night.' And it connects random people in the middle of the night in a phone call... It's kind of like Chat Roulette, except that your phone rings in the middle of the night and you pick up the phone and talk to people... When I learned about it, I was like, 'I want that but during the day'... And so we started just having random phone calls with a small group of people on this app called 'One on One' and it would just call a group of us, we were all friends, and we would just have to talk to each other. But most of us were actually self-employed, so we ended up just talking about what we were working on and then realized it was super helpful..."The Your Boss app is currently only available for iOS but there is a waitlist for Android. Thanks, Mark!