Ex-Microsoft programmer launches Zoom rival, vows secure, free-speech, virtual meeting site

In 2020 during the height of the pandemic, Zoom was hosting about 300 million daily participants. That’s also when the term “Zoombombing” was coined after uninvited guests crashed some of the virtual meetings; and when Zoom shut down a U.S.-based activist group that irritated the Chinese Communist Party by commemorating the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests.

After backlash, Zoom reinstated the group and it says it has fixed Zoombombing, though its alleged deficiencies, and those of similar services like Google Meet and Microsoft Teams, provide ammunition for Rick Raddatz to pitch his new product, dubbed Meetn.

“We’re targeting the freedom-loving, privacy-minded community that have propelled others to prominence, like Parler, Signal and Telegram,” said Raddatz. “We collect only the minimum data to perform the service and we do not sell, rent or share any.”

Zoom, in fact, was accused of sharing data with Google, LinkedIn and an analytics firm, and it settled a lawsuit for $85 million before it changed some of its privacy practices.

Zoom didn’t respond to a request for comment from Just the News.

Meetn has been around for a year, but it will launch in earnest with what it calls AffiliateFest, where 20 experts in the marketing space will explain how best to use the service for businesses.

“And we’re also going after the crypto-fanatics space,” said Raddatz, noting that Meetn has partnered with a digital currency he won’t yet name. “The more you use the service, the more crypto rewards you get.”

During an interview with Just the News, Raddatz said a few things that he later asked not be included in the story. But emphasizing his First Amendment credentials, he said: “But you have the freedom to do whatever you want, and that’s fine. Our concept of freedom is free speech.”

Meetn is also launching an AI product like Zoom and the others have. “But if you use a competitor’s AI service they own rights to your likeness and content, whereas our terms of service will be the minimum we need to launch,” Raddatz said. 

Plus, a customer “paid a large sum of money for a private label service,” he said, without naming the client. “It’s further proof of our early momentum.”

Raddatz spent 12 years with Microsoft as a designer and programmer manager before launching audio and video hosting services in 2003, though he folded them after YouTube dominated the space.

Then he launched an audio-only conferencing service in 2007 dubbed InstantTeleSeminar. By 2013 he was lobbying his business partners to embrace video, but they declined, and they did so again in 2015.

About three years later, he bought out his partners and got to work on creating Meetn. In two rounds of funding he raised $4.5 million from angel investors, declining to name them or say what the funding valued the company at.

Unlike competitors, Meetn operates in a browser, so there’s nothing to install, and users can share their screens but they may also preload slide shows or other content, also separating Meetn from the competition.

There’s a free version and upgrades are cheaper than the competitors. It’s $9.95 monthly version is akin to Zoom’s $16.65 product, for example.

During his interview with Just the News, Raddatz argued that too many tech companies have engaged in left-wing activism, and he stressed that Meetn is non-partisan and it will not shut down users due to their politics.

“In this day and age, everyone is doing video meetings for personal and business use,” he said. “But if they’re paying one of my competitors, some of that money is being used to fund political movements they probably don’t believe in. If our values of freedom, privacy and security align with yours, then we’re your company.”