| Thawd, trying to melt the social freeze. It was psychology applied to finding things to do, instead of meetup.com where you scrolled through a list of events and picked one weeks out from now, or a "friend making" site that had you swipe through faces, you instead selected from a list of events happening in the next 72 hours (immediacy). Personality matching[1], tuned for "will these people vibe", was used to arrange the groups. Groups were 4-6 people, small enough for real conversations to happen. You didn't get to see photos of people until you were at the event and ready to meet (avoiding the beauty contest problem). Imagine a giant "I AM BORED, FIND ME SOMETHING TO DO RIGHT NOW" button. No endless scrolling, just a few choices, happening soon, presented to the user. Investors weren't too pleased, two sided marketplace. Small businesses loved the idea, they only had to pay for people who actually showed up. Geo-fencing was used to track when people spent time at an event, basically a bill was only sent out if someone spent 30 minutes or so in the geo-fenced event area. (Phone privacy limitations and GPS throttling made that harder and harder). Goal was to launch with local business partners at first and then migrate to letting individuals create events. Stretch goal was to train an ML model up on creating a minimum viable set of questions to discover small groups that would vibe together, then license the ML model out to casinos, cruise ships, and such. [1] test came from research in the EU, since American universities largely study friendships at work... ugh. |