Fireside
Conversation activities for families, classrooms, and teams
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Justin Millen

Fireside - Conversation activities for families, classrooms, and teams

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Fireside provides a library of guided conversation activities that turn awkward video calls into meaningful connection. Perfect for long-distance families, remote classrooms, therapy sessions, and distributed teams. Stop the small talk. Start real conversations.

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Justin Millen
Maker
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Hey Product Hunt! 👋 I'm Justin, and I'm honestly a anxious to share this, but here goes. **Why I Built This:** A few years ago, I barely knew my own siblings. 18-year age gap with my youngest sibling, living in different cities. We'd do video calls, but they always felt forced. Eight minutes of "How's school?" before someone had to go. I realized the problem wasn't that we didn't care. It was that nobody knew how to move past small talk on a screen. So I started building simple conversation activities we could use during our calls. It worked. Our calls went from obligation to something we actually looked forward to. **What Fireside Is:** 50+ conversation activities you use during video calls. Pull one up on Zoom or FaceTime, share your screen, and it guides the conversation. "Would You Rather" questions, storytelling prompts, discussion topics. No app to download. Works with whatever video platform you already use. **Who I Think It's For:** I built it for families, but I'm realizing it could work for remote classrooms, therapy sessions, distributed teams. Honestly, I'm still figuring out who needs this most. **Try It Free:** Pick Your Potion is completely free. No signup, no credit card: startfireside.com Paid plans are $5.99/month for access to all 50+ activities. **Where I Need Help:** I'm a solo founder figuring this out as I go. A few things I'd love feedback on: 1. Does this actually solve a problem you have, or am I building something only I need? 2. What would make you actually use this vs just having another awkward call? 3. Am I positioning this wrong? Should I focus on families, teams, educators... or all of them? 4. What other conversation activities would you want to see? I read and respond to every comment. Seriously, tear this apart. I need honest feedback more than I need upvotes. Thanks for giving this a shot. Justin
Justin Millen
Maker

Quick follow-up on who else this works for:

Teachers: A bunch of educators have been testing this in virtual classrooms. Turns out it's really helpful for substitute teachers who walk into a class of kids they've never met. No lesson plan needed, just pull up an activity and you've got 20 minutes of actual engagement instead of chaos.

Remote teams: We've had some distributed teams use it for on-boarding and team bonding. Way better than forced icebreakers. People actually want to do it.

Therapists: This one surprised me, but several therapists reached out saying they use the conversation prompts in sessions. Helps clients open up without feeling like they're in therapy.

The core thing is the same across all of them - you need people talking to each other, but starting from scratch is awkward. This just gives you something to react to.

Still figuring out which use cases matter most. If you're a teacher, work on a remote team, or just have awkward family calls like me, would love to know what you'd actually use.