[palderson]

A speaker at a Founders Institute event, his name escapes me, spoke about his experience starting this very business. The problem he encountered was that at events, or any social gathering, there was typically a small percentage of people in attendance, call them the stars, that everyone else wanted to meet. But the stars only wanted to meet other stars, meaning the demand is not evenly distributed across would-be users. So, if you are to go ahead with it, I suggest you consider how to overcome this issue.

[mittermayr]

that is part of the core problems i wrote down. imagine paul graham is in new york for a day and decides to meet some people in 30 min slots on a thursday afternoon. everyone's gonna request a meeting. but it's his call to move requests into the actual booked slots. the person arriving in a city is the one who accepts the meeting based on the incoming requests (filterable by haves/wants). does that make sense? would it be smarter to have locals accept/deny?

[OmarIsmail]

This is the thing though, do you really think someone like pg would have difficulty finding A-level people to meet when he travels? The thing about A-level people is they already know other A-level people who can make an intro in that city. And actually now they'd probably just have their assistant do all the work and have a scheduled lined up for when they get there. So your service is going to be for < A-listers, which nobody cares that much to meet.

Looking at the travel market more broadly you have people who travel extensively do it for either business or pleasure, but mostly business. The kind of person that travels for business a lot usually has a packed schedule without much free time. Any free time on their trip that they do have they're probably going to use to take it easy. However "taking it easy" on a business trip is pretty crummy since you often don't know anybody.

Here's an idea - a service that is focused on frequent business travelers. Not the A-listers, but regular professionals that just travel a lot and would probably get along really well with other business professionals that travel a lot.

You can integrate with TripIt as a way to have exclusivity (must go on > threshold trips/miles in timespan) you also then have TripIt information to know where people are going. Automatically the service can see which Trippers are going to be in the same location on the same night (on a trip) and automatically say "Hey, there's 10 trippers in Manhattan on Thursday night, are you interested in an event?" Reply Yes and the service creates the event that people just have to show up to. You as the service will make the reservation, and handle all the logistics of notifying people. People just have to say "yes I'm interested".

[mittermayr]

just first off, fucking love streak. now my response:

everything you say is true. a-listers won't have problems meeting other a-listers. but that's not what i'm trying to achieve. i do know though that sometimes, a-listers might be curious/open to meet others as well. couple of examples:

lars hinrichs is running hackfwd, germany incubator, definitely a-lister. he's a cool guy who regularly tunes in to random startups/founders and wants to hear what they're working on. two 30 minute slots during a business trip where he can select from 'meeting requests' would probably be interesting to him. that's startup world though.

say you're jimmy fallon. crazy popular. he flies to london and says he wants to meet 3 random writers who can request a meeting with him. promotional opportunity.

or, you, the guy from streak, goes to paris, does not want to be bothered by random 1-person startup folks but rather meet someone who might be a tech guy, but his dad owns a french bakery and invites you to take your girlfriend there and see what they do. probably worth that hour?

just a couple of thoughts on that.

then, for professional travelers, i used to fly a lot for microsoft and i always had time. evenings, or sometimes late afternoons. i knew people in cities i traveled to, but sometimes you're back in chicago for the fourth time and feel like meeting someone you don't know yet but who shares your interest or works in a similar sector, etc.

the frequent flyer thought is very interesting. as long as i get to keep out the networking crazies, that'd be a perfect monetization aspect.