Lunchclub is “curated 1:1 professional connections”, or “Smart introductions to relevant people”. Their mission is “… to make meaningful offline connections between professionals.”
Awesome.
Since hearing from them by cold email on Apr 15, 2020, I have been an instant fan.
It has been more than 2 months and I check it several times a week. And I don’t think I’m alone.
It got me thinking this startup had to have done a lot of things right to have this level of success.
So I took notes.
First Contact
Their cold email was an indication that they get it.
They had:
something of interest to me (to connect/network from home via 1:1 video)
“a waitlist” to promote scarcity
trust factors like PR (Forbes) and investor backing (a16z)
explained their core value proposition in 14 words
prepared a “personalized” a sign-up link
given me an easy way to opt-out (by not replying/clicking on anything)
Total word count: 94
So far, so good.
Design
Their home page looks like this.
Their design looks and feels minimal, but each page is very goal-oriented.
Profile page — about your interests and what you want to talk about, so others can see and their machine learning algorithm can do better. “Feed our algo so we can get better over time”
Home page — shows your connections and who you may meet. “Stay with us and don’t miss out on connecting with these people”
Meetings page — shows past meetings where you can provide feedback. “Again, feed our algo to get you better matches”
Invite page — for those who found value, they have a personalized invite link, some suggested invites (because I connected with my LinkedIn), a pre-written sample tweet, and show the status of my past invites (whether they had a meeting recently, or hasn’t responded). “Invite people to earn the currency to network some more.”
Product
They made each interaction lightweight.
The heaviest, which requires thinking of your own bio, is done early in the experience.
Other forms of input are largely optional (when you have energy and motivation to fill out).
Almost everything else is point-and-click.
The questions, though take effort to answer, are providing more perceived value than the perceived effort it takes to answer.
How thoughtful of them :)
Channels
This one really gets me excited.
Email — used to notify users of key events, 1) getting to know your upcoming match to save you time researching the person before the call, 2) intro email as if it’s a warm intro email from a real person, 3) review of how relevant the match was after a meeting.
Value-add at each step.
Referral - used to get more users on Lunchclub (obvious). I can only speak to the sending end. During the first week of sign up, there were no matches so all I really could do was invite others who I thought would want this service.
This in fact also clues in their algo as to weed out those unlikely to find Lunchclub useful for them. They did it in a way that didn’t make you feel like a sellout.
Impressive.
Google Calendar - used to notify users for key events and managing schedules. Their nice integration tells you to block out availability on Thursdays and Fridays at 1h timeslots you specify at the beginning of the week. They replace it with a real invite if you have a match, and simply remove the placeholders.
The only thing that gets tricky is they sometimes send one invite a little too close (because the scheduled time was 8am and they only confirmed around 4am, when most people, including myself, were catching some zzz).
Aside from that, it’s all good.
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Honestly, I feel like I’ve only scratched the surface.
Had I missed something obvious? Have things changed the time of this writing?
Please let me know :)
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