The Journey Of Building Milo
Humans are suckers for finding similar people and bonding with them
There is something about meeting new people. There is a tinge of freshness about it. It knocks you out of your routine. When it happens, it's awesome! But as you grow older you realize that it doesn’t happen very often. It becomes stressful or intimidating to meet someone new. The resistance starts to creep in and keeps growing. So much that you start avoiding meeting new people!
“Do you think meeting new people is a waste of time? Or are you just lazy and think that meeting someone new really is a hassle?”
The truth is that there are many people out there who want to meet new people. A quick Google search or search on the app store will give you a good idea of the number of people who are looking to meet new people. The intent behind meeting new people are different, of course. Make new friends, find a date, find a job, just networking and cure loneliness are among the most popular intents.
While we jumped in a little deeper, we noticed that dating was the most crowded space with tons of great apps on the app store. Almost everything about “meeting new people” was about dating. This made it extremely hard and uncomfortable for people who didn’t have the intent of dating to meet new people. We knew that we had to build something that would make meeting new people easy for these people and remind everyone else that meeting new people doesn’t always have to be about dating!
We started by building Glynk last year. You can think of Glynk as an open community of people who want to meet new people. But there are a variety of people there. Different cities, countries, races, languages. It was about allowing them to filter people based on something that is dear to them, something they use to filter people in real life.
After talking to a few hundred people, we found that people connected with someone who shared an immense passion for the things they were passionate about. It just opened a lot of gates. They had so much to talk about right from the word go. We knew that we had to give ways for people to talk about the things they like and are most passionate about. People came to try Glynk, told us their interests, started conversations, made new friends and…
…and they left. They just didn’t seem to stick around for a long time.
We knew something was missing. When we asked the people who were still around and a few of those who had left, it became pretty evident that the connections formed on the app weren’t as solid as a real-life friendship. The ones who continued using the app had actually met their Glynk friends in real life. They were grateful to the app and knew about the endless possibilities of meeting new people. Now we knew what we needed to do next.
We wanted to enable anyone to create spontaneous meetups and let people nearby join them for it. It could be for anything. We started building the Meetups features. We hit the jackpot, right? We thought so too. But not for too long.
Yes, a lot of people were creating meetups and even loving the feature. But physical meetups were just not happening. We tried to tweak the experience of creating meetups, made it simpler, added more privacy controls. But there was no change in the behavior. There were a small percentage of meetups that people were joining and fewer meetups that were actually happening in real life.
We went back to our community and asked them what was wrong. The ones who were meeting before we launched the app found the meetup experience do no difference to them. They were still starting conversations online, taking it to the private chat, talking for a few weeks before deciding to actually meet in real life. A few who had mutual friends accomplished it much faster. We also noticed that a ton of apps has been trying to solve this problem for a long time. (Reid Hoffman tried solving it with SocialNet in 1998 — “technology for matching people up” )
It was pretty evident that it was not going to be very simple.
We brought it down to 4 major problems:
- Lack of trust. Trust is an essential factor in every relationship. You’ve never seen or met these people before in real life. The added sense of security that a real-life meeting gives is missing and there is no easy way to compensate for it.
- Distance. While not a big demotivator, it increased the levels resistance to go out and meet someone new.
- Timing. This is not an event to see your favorite musician perform. You cannot schedule it. More the time gap between committing to a meetup and actually meeting, higher are the chances of making excuses and skipping the meetup.
- Activity. People don’t want to meet a stranger and then end up staring at each other with the same question “So what now?”. When we introduced the concept of meetups on Glynk, we gave the users a free hand to create a meetup for any activity of their choice. They could basically type anything, choose a venue, time and Hola, their meetup was live. As an open community, we would get varied kinds of meetups, often deemed inappropriate by a segment of the audience. We knew we had to bring some regulation and consistency to it.
Now that we had listed down the top 4 issues stopping us from helping people really meet, it was down to solving them.
Building trust. Easily the toughest problem to solve. Building trust doesn’t take time because it’s complicated; it takes time because you need to establish a reliable pattern of behavior. That’s how our power users were managing to actually meet people too. They would chat for weeks before taking the plunge to actually meet in real life. Was there a hack to this? We flirted with a few ideas of peer to peer rating, public reviews. But guess what? People didn’t like the idea of getting reviewed, especially when the reviews were bad. They are able to handle criticism better as businesses than as individuals. There were no shortcuts to building trust. So we decided to take the backdoor route and start connecting people where trust is already established. People who live in a gated community or people who work at the same organization or people studying together. There was a higher level of trust already established. It was also quite surprising that most of these communities were not socially connected. Many of them were connected on Whatsapp groups but knew nothing about most of the people in the group. Just random names and numbers. Randomly messaging someone in the community who you’ve not met was deemed creepy and for all the right reasons.
Solving the distance issue was not hard. The solution seemed obvious. Show only meetups happening in my vicinity. Most of the people were ready to go up to 4 Miles for a meetup, but they preferred nearer locations that they could commute to by walk. Interesting!
To beat procrastination and resist the temptation of canceling, we designed our meetup experience in such a way that people would open it only when they were free. We did away with the concept of scheduling meetups or seeing upcoming meetups. Just by reducing the time to say no, we got more people to actually meet.
We created a list of 40 activities that people like doing. They require minimal skill but some level of interest. People were ready to meet new people over events and activities, especially sports. Activities like ‘Meet over coffee’, ‘Brainstorm ideas’, ‘Grab a bite’ are now part of this list. By just shaking your phone or using two taps, the user can now create a meetup for the activity of his choice. This reduces the cognitive load on the user and enables them to create more meetups and tell the community they were free.
“Got some free time?”
“Shake your phone”
“Meetup”
Today, we launch Milo for Hunters. We created a community on Milo for the Product Hunt users. Its one of the best tech communities out there, in terms of quality, organization and behavior. Meetups are organized in different cities every month, but that’s the only time most community members get to meet each other. As an active member of the PH community for 3 years now, I just felt that this could be made easier. Why wait for meetups to meet your community IRL? Just shake your phone and plan an instant meetup with another Product Hunt member nearby. Meet over coffee, have a drink or play poker. You can talk about countless topics over activities you love doing.
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