Ash Maurya

Running Lean: Raise Your Odds of Building a Successful Product

"The Networker takes a gentle and meaningful approach to building connections in such a way that you can be of help to others and others can be of help to you."

Does this mean that your organizer does the "ASK" between connections? It would be really interesting to see how this tool works. Would it "recommend" people you can connect to when you say, post a specific requirement? 

Hi Reema,

thanks for taking the time to comment. What do you exactly mean with the "ASK"? That goal is to help you grow useful connections and in that sense the app would help you uncover the needs and wants of others you connect with such that it could provide you a venue to be useful to others and find the right people to meet your needs.

What I'm talking about is non zero-sum games, ie both you and the other party come out of the connection enriched. This is a fundamental shift in an approach to connect that too often focus on one's gain and because of that fall short.

Hi Spike,

Your description gives me a better understanding of your tool. What i meant by "ASK" is e.g. i need help for my business or someone else's from x person (who right now is not my contact) would the tool search that x person for me based on the requirement that i post? I am not sure if i am in line with your thoughts. 

What is your special sauce for growing this social network to replace LinkedIn and all the others?

Hi Ashish,

thanks for commenting, it's great feedback and this is the kind do challenges that can help us do better, so thank you.

To answer your question, LinkedIn is just a part of the service if that makes sense. Indeed It dies provide you with contacts and provides with some discoverability, but in my experience it does a very poor job at locality. For example, if I'm trying to build a tech startup in London versus San Francisco the tech scene is very different. I have not seen linkedin filling that gap, at best it'll recommend ppl doing business in London or SF. What I'm envisioning is more of a mash-up of linkeding, twitter and meetup (which is really good for local scene).

On top of that LinkedIn does nothing to help you grow those relationships, it does at best point out some ppl to connect to. Same for twitter. There's some good techniques to follow up and strengthen relationships and that's a lot of added value. I would argue in fact that most linkedin connections are as empty as most Facebook friends. I think the Networker can help you to actually leverage those connections.

I have some further thoughts about the power of local/micro, but hopefully this is enough to explain where I'm coming from. I dont intend to compete with linkedin , i intend to leverage it and fill a gap it left.

And mind you, this is my experience and my hypothesis, it's all stuff that needs to be tested and rob ably will turn out to need changes :)

What do you think?

@spikelab

I think it would be good to focus on a very specific link in the networking value chain, and then give tangible examples of how someone can use your service in ways that aren't already possible with LinkedIn, Facebook, Meetup, Grubwithus, LetsLunch, etc.

E.g. you mentioned locality. How can your service help "John" and "Mary" make a local connection that they wouldn't otherwise have made?

Great point Ashish, thanks for taking the time to leave this feedback.

If I had to pick one aspect I'd definitely focus on the cultivating the relationship part. To an extent it's totally true that the discovery need is already served by other services, albeit not to the extent I'd like them to, but that's just me and would still be maybe only marginal.

Growing the relationship instead is something I haven't really seen done except in CRM like services, but those serve a very different purpose and are structured to reflect that.

Thanks again for your comments and please let me know if there's anything I can do to help you.

Spike

I don't understand what you mean by "cultivating the relationship part." I think you need to be much more specific - give examples of how it would work in real life.

Ok, how about this very situation? we just connected in a sense as we're having this conversation. It's not a great deal of interactions, but so far it's been pretty interesting and I'd like to understand a bit more about what you're doing and what I could do to help. However It's pretty late right now and I really need to sleep so I'll just close the comp with the intention to maybe write back tomorrow. But tomorrow I'll be busy and so I will the day after. Before I realize the course is over and actually I never wrote back. I lost an opportunity to create a connection with someone interesting. This happens over and over to me and to other folks I talked to. I've met quite a few interesting folks at various workshops that for a reason or another I never managed to create a relationship with. Yes some of them I have on Linkedin, but they are little more than a number. Going back now even telling them where we met may do little to recreate that moment we had when we first connected.

If I had The Networker I could just copy paste your name into it and make a quick note, maybe select all your comments for reference and add them in. The app would be able to get some context from the site, maybe the course itself, cross reference it with the calendar and mash them all up. If in a few days I haven't added anything to that entry it alerts me and ask me "hey, you seemed to have found this person interesting, should you be trying to reconnect? here's what you guys discussed".

is this clearer/more specific? there's more to it, maybe later we connect on linkedin, or meet at a specific meetup/workshop, etc, and eventually it turns out you need a tech person and I, tech person, happen to be looking for a job. But I need to really catch some zzz :)

thanks again for the questions, they've been really useful

Okay. Now I'm beginning to see the picture you're painting. A "relationship organizer." I'd use that. The trick will be to make it extremely usable - seamless. Cool idea.

http://leancanvas.com/canvases/58025
<img src="http://dl.dropbox.com/u/87985920/the-networker-2nd.png" alt="The Networker - be of help and get help from your professional connections - image 1 - student project" class="zoomable rounded-image-wrapper" srcset="http://dl.dropbox.com/u/87985920/the-networker-2nd.png 600w, http://dl.dropbox.com/u/87985920/the-networker-2nd.png 1000w" sizes="(max-width: 600px) 600px, 100vw" loading="lazy">
How wonderful was the last time you built a meaningful relationship with someone? Didn't it make your life better?
When's the last time you've done that for your business? How many relationships have you missed a chance to build?
The Networker takes a gentle and meaningful approach to building connections in such a way that you can be of help to others and others can be of help to you.
Building meaninful relationships is hard work and people with a busier schedule often forget to tend to their social life. With the best intention catching up with new people can be dauting and The Networker fixes that.

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