Add a Social Network to Your Offline Event to Make It More Fun and Help People Meet

Panic

Sweat running down your back

Utter fear

Who are you supposed to talk to?

Even when you connect with a new group, what are you supposed to talk about?

How long will you talk about the weather and Elon Musk before you hit on a more interesting topic?

In How to Prepare Dates and Find Business Partners, I complained about this problem. It has two parts:

1. Who to talk with?

If you’re in a group of people and you don’t know most of them, you don’t know who to talk with because you don’t know who they are, what they’re interested in, and whether you have things to share. As a result, you usually stay with those you know, and you miss an opportunity to get to know new people. 

If you don’t know anybody at the party, you will feel alone for a long time until you decide to talk to someone, with whom you probably have little in common. Many people will simply not subject themselves to that, and won’t go to the event.

2. What to talk about?

Once you do meet someone, what are you supposed to talk about? You don’t know their interests, they don’t know yours, so you’ll default to the stuff that most people can discuss: the weather, Kim Kardashian, the war in Ukraine… But what if you’re both passionate about using AI to improve the quality of human reasoning? How can you figure that out? It might take hours of conversation, moving from topic to topic to find one that might interest you both. You might not get the time, because there are many other people to talk to, and until you find something that interests both, the conversation will be mostly irrelevant.

What if there was a way to quickly browse the other participants at the event and get a good sense of what they’re interested in?

We’ve built this. 

This problem bothered me so much that I kept going back to it, and now my partner Ivan and I have created an app to solve it.

I mentioned it a few weeks ago when I introduced the vision for the Uncharted Territories social network:

We built it, and Uncharted Territories readers are already getting in touch with each other. 

But then we realized one thing: People don’t want to meet more people online. They already have most of their needs met there. No, people want to meet others offline.

So imagine you are organizing your offline event. Instead of people awkwardly hovering in their corners at the beginning, they can do this:

A poster showing all the people at the party, where guests can spot themselves and see who is similar to them.

Or even better, they can look at this on their phone:

They can find what type of people will join the event, and where they stand relative to others.

They can browse to find profiles:

Filter the search and save the most interesting profiles:

They can also find the top 10 people most similar to themselves:

Or directly search for some type of profile:

How does the app know who you are, and who you are like? You fill out a simple questionnaire:

The app quickly uses this information to calculate who you are, what you do, and who is similar to you:

Do you organize offline events where you want people to meet? Would you be interested in testing this idea with your guests? Good! We’re going to pick a few people and test the idea with them. If you’re interested, let me know, and we can test it together!

For that, simply reply to this email and tell me:

1. Who you are

2. What type of event you’re organizing

3. What type of guests you will have

4. How many you are expecting

5. What features you would need this app to have

We’ll then have a quick call to discuss the details, and we’ll make it happen!

Right now, it’s just my partner Ivan and myself working on this, so we’re just figuring things out. One of the things we would like to know is if people are interested enough in this to pay for it. We’re thinking a reasonable price would be $100 per event plus $1 per guest, but we’re more interested in learning at this point, so don’t hesitate to reach out by replying to this email!