We sell over Google Meet every day. Demos, follow-ups, renewals: there are usually two of us on our side and one or more people on the client's. And almost every call has the same moment: one of us needs to tell the other something, right now, without the client noticing.
"Don't give a price yet." "Ask about volume." "Let's not waive the setup fee for these guys." Five or six words that are worth a lot at the right second and nothing a minute later.
Psst was born from the last one.
The message that arrived too late
For a long time we handled it the way almost everyone does: with a Slack message. While my partner talked to the client, I typed in another window and hoped they'd see it.
They didn't. And that made sense: they were watching the meeting, which is exactly what they were supposed to do. By the time they opened Slack, the setup fee was already gone. The line had arrived too late, and in a negotiation arriving late is the same as not arriving at all.
The other version of the problem was worse. If the person talking was sharing their screen, the Slack notification could pop up on top of whatever they were showing. "Let's not waive the setup fee" on the screen the client is looking at isn't a lost message. It's a message delivered to the wrong person.
What we tried first
Before writing a line of code, we went through what we already had. None of the options met both conditions at once: your teammate sees it right away, and nobody else sees it at all.
- Meet's chat is right there, but it goes to every participant. It has no private one-to-one messages, so writing there means writing to the client too.
- Slack or any team chat isn't where your teammate is looking, and its notifications can slip into a shared screen.
- WhatsApp means looking at your phone mid-meeting. Nobody does that while talking to a client, and if they do, it shows.
- Looks and gestures work for "wrap it up" or "keep going", not for "ask about volume". And the client sees them too.
The place your teammate is already looking is the meeting itself: the faces on the call. That's where the message had to show up.
What it had to do, and what it didn't
Psst is a Chrome extension for Google Meet. When two people from the same team are in the same meeting, each one sees a small mark next to the other's name. One click on their tile, a line of up to 140 characters, Enter. Your teammate sees it over your camera, on their screen, and nobody else does.
The decisions came from real calls:
- Short. 140 characters are enough for a cue. If it takes a paragraph, it's not for the middle of a meeting.
- Ephemeral. The message shows for 7 seconds and disappears. There's no history, no inbox, no search.
- Answerable. Whoever gets it taps 👍 or 👎, or replies with another line. The sender knows it landed.
- Quiet. Nothing floating, and nothing in Meet changes beyond that mark next to the name.
What we left out was just as deliberate: no long messages, no attachments, no other platforms. Today it works on Google Meet with Chrome on a computer, and nowhere else.
Truly private, or nothing
A message that doesn't arrive is a minor problem. A message that shows up on a screen other people can see is the end of the product. That rule shapes everything else.
If you share your screen from Meet, Psst hides before Meet starts broadcasting. If your teammate is presenting, you can't write to them: their tile says "presenting" and won't open. Whenever there's any doubt about whether someone is sharing their screen, Psst shows nothing.
Messages are end-to-end encrypted: the server passes them from one browser to the other without being able to read them, and doesn't store them. They're drawn in the recipient's browser, so they never appear in the video, the recording or the meeting transcript.
There's one limit we'd rather say out loud: if you share your screen with another app, like Zoom or OBS, Psst can't know. For those cases there's a shortcut, Alt+Shift+P, which turns on safe mode and hides everything at once.
What's next
Psst is in beta and free while it lasts. After that it will cost USD 4.99 per month per team, with unlimited seats, and we'll let you know before charging anything.
It isn't for everything, either. It's not for secretly helping someone who is supposed to manage on their own, like in an exam or a job interview. That's in the terms, and we take it seriously.
It's for what we built it for: getting the right line to your teammate at the right second. If you want to see how it works step by step, read how to send a private message in Google Meet. And if you try it and something doesn't work the way you expected, write to us at help@psst.team. We read it ourselves.
Add to Chrome