Introducing 100ms Starter Kits

Building live audio or video is hard.

At 100ms, we’re working on simplifying that process because we believe that nearly all apps will have live audio/video in the future — a “live-first” digital world if you will.

100ms is industry-agnostic, thus enabling product managers (PMs), developers, and engineers to shape and build real-time, life-like interactions the way they see fit for a multitude of functions. In fact, with the 100ms SDK, our customers have already built diverse use cases across industries such as dating, gaming, education, and the like — delivering millions of live audio/video minutes to their users.

But, as modern users increasingly demand real-time interactive experiences online, the delta for delivering value has changed astronomically. To meet these demands closely, PMs and developers want to experience a feature before they build it out themselves. This is where the 100ms Starter Kits come in.

Bridging Imagination and Experience
After launching our Virtual Event Starter Kit in partnership with Vercel, we realized that our customers loved the fact that we were able to instantly deliver a working demo of a Virtual Event Use Case. Since the starter kit is open source, anyone could take the code to extend that experience.

By enabling this, we realized that users could instantly connect their imagination to what the app would actually look like.

In other words, we were able to bridge the gap between imagination and experience.

This is what inspired us to build the 100ms Starter Kits.

What are these Starter Kits?
These starter kits are proof-of-concept versions of use cases constructed on real-life interactions built with the 100ms SDK. We developed them with the hope that you’ll use them to actualize a feature/app you’ve been thinking about for a while, and go “This is what I wanted to build!”

For example, let’s say you wanted to simulate the action of tapping a colleague’s shoulder to discuss something — while in an online meeting. These starter kits enable you to experience that exact feature by providing a one-click demo. You can also choose to deploy them and start experimenting.

These starter kits are a quick jumping-off point to demonstrate a working, proof-of-concept version of whatever you are imagining. Moreover, these kits also serve as the building blocks for implementing your own ideas.

What can you do with these Starter Kits?

Instant Demos: Immediately experience our starter kits with the View Demo option in our Examples section. This allows you to measure the audio and video quality of our SDKs with the added context of User Interfaces.

Open Source Github Repos: You can download the source code of these starter kits and break it down for reference code implementations. You can also experiment and build on these starter kits with your ideas.

Deploy to Vercel: Deploy these starter kits to your Vercel account and experiment with them in your own environment.

Breaking down a Starter Kit
Our starter kits are open-sourced apps wrapped as frontend layers around our template policy (business logic around roles & permissions) and the 100ms SDK.

To break this down further, let’s use an example.

Let’s say you want to build a one-click engagement solution between coworkers — something as simple as tapping a colleague’s shoulder to talk to them, but in a virtual environment (like a Slack Huddle).

Before this launch, you could have created an audio room template to implement this action. But while you would’ve had an audio-first conversation with it, a holistic experience isn’t being realized. Now, with the starter kit, you can build on this experience, add an interactive one-click button to the app, and get much closer to a product that replicates real-world, in-person communication.

In the above example, the audio room is the template (use case), and the frontend UI is wrapped around it, allowing for the solution to show up as a one-click engagement. Combined with the 100ms SDK, the entire package comprises a single Starter Kit app.

Five Starter Kits You Can Try Out

As of now, we have rolled out five starter kits with various use-cases with 100ms Examples. Some of them have actually been developed with the help of our amazing community.

We look forward to adding more of these kits in the near future, so as to enable more relatable and delightful quick-start experiences. But for now, these are our initial rollouts:

1. Video Conference Starter Kit
Offer your customers engaging live conference experiences with excellent audio/video quality via 100ms’ Video Conferencing Starter Kit. This is a full-fledged feature-rich starter kit for building any audio/video conferencing product.

2. Virtual Event Starter Kit

Own your live event experience with this — a virtual events starter kit with real-time audio-video interactions that you can configure on the go. With this starter kit, you can host a live event or a live workshop with 10,000 viewers.

3. Slack Huddle Clone

Help users get on impromptu, lightweight audio calls for a quick, real-time conversation with the 100ms Slack Huddle Clone kit. With this starter kit, you can build the “quick tap conversation” use case discussed above.

4. Discord Clone

Offer your users an excellent audio conferencing/streaming experience with in-built advanced interactivity. Use our Discord Starter Kit to host or build a community discussion experience.

5. Audio Room

Build audio-first apps with this starter kit and engage your users with experiences like live audio calling, podcast streaming, clubhouse-like audio rooms, and more.

Closing Notes
With the launch of Starter Kits, we aim to unveil a new dimension of experimentation for our users. So head to the Examples section from the navbar and start building your own live experience. Don’t forget to share your apps with us, because we can’t wait to see what you build!

If you are looking to contribute to these Starter Kits or partner with us, reach out to us in our Discord community!