[brudgers]

All I saw was an email signup, which dissappated whatever enthusiasm I had that caused me to click on the link. Typing an email address into the box would not gratify my curiosity nor create an alternative to the tools I use to chat with strangers today (e.g. HN, StackExchange, Facebook, Reddit, BBS's).

I suppose that suggests the hard problem...instant gratification via a competitive alternative. Waiting two weeks or a month or a year for is time that will be spent deepening my existing habits.

Good luck.

[pipipzz]

Duly Noted. After you enter your email address and click on the Notify CTA, we ask you to fill just the basic information in a Google Form. Once we have your interests and enough number of signups to match users, we will be sending you matching emails with details of the person you can talk to, including some ice-breakers for your common interest.

Another point, instead of the email and notify flow, if I show you a CTA called 'Get Started' and on clicking I open the google form to collect your interests, would that be better?

[brudgers]

To me, the basic user experience question is "does the user want to fill out a form?" If the answer is 'yes' then provide the user with the experience of filling out a form. If the answer is 'no' then give careful consideration to an onboaring process that requires filling out a form.

To me, the hard part of user experience is putting what the user likes in front of what makes life easy for the developer.

My advice: Pick one or two topics and just let the user pick one or the other or both or none and go from there. Some people will click on topics that they are not interested in, just to see what the platform is like. If a few people find the topics interesting then the platform can grow...and if no one finds the topics interesting then display some different topics.

It might even be worth picking some topics that the software team is interested in and having the team engage with users as users just to make the conversations balance when there is only one outside user.

In other words, my advice is to make simple experiments to see what works for a few people rather than trying to build something for 'everyone' before there are at least a few people who like to use the platform.