Weave - Tinder for professionals nearby

Weave is one of my favorite networking apps - if not my favorite. I have tried Treatings and unfortunately people on there aren't as responsive, since it's more one-sided. With Weave, when you find that two people want to meet each other, it makes the process a little more exciting. I may be a little biased, but I've met so many great people through Weave, and the people on Weave generally seem to be more open about meeting than do people on Treatings.

Thanks Ryan - I've been obsessed with professional networking since founding my first startup. (Decide was my second). While Decide was going through the acquisition process, I started going to a ton more Seattle startup events and the initial pain I had of walking into a room full of people I don't know inspired this.

@zealoustiger - That makes sense. Communities usually form around the founder(s) early one. How do you plan to acquire users?

I think events/conferences and places with high densities of people already there open to networking is the most straightforward route, so that means working with event organizers and giving them value add on top of their events. Seeing how quickly it's spreading via just word of mouth in Seattle though, I think I may have to wait on the user acquisition a bit and figure out a better way for people to sift through and find the people they'd most likely want to connect with first.

@zealoustiger - Have you found any surprising or interesting behavior emerging from your initial user base?

@zealoustiger - #1 is interesting b/c the purpose of the app is to connect with new people primarily. I'm always interested in hearing how people use products in unexpected ways. :) WRT to MVP's, what was yours?

What you see now was it. We developed it in 3 weeks + 1 week Apple approval process. We painstakingly cut all of the fat - you'll see that there's no mutual connections, we didn't pull LinkedIn contact to eliminate your friends, etc. Maybe I'm just not clever enough, but I couldn't think of any way to not build anything to test behavior that required a geolocation behavior like Weave's. I ended up just pitching and showing mockups to friends during the 3 weeks to get initial feedback. Other than that, it was literally coding 24/7.

@zealoustiger - observing user behavior is no doubt the best signal (although costly to get there). How are you planning to monetize?

Been using Weave for a few days - been very effective so far. I actually think it out-Tinders Tinder. The reason is that in a professional setting you really do care about mutual interests (industry/area of expertise), and the LinkedIn graph is very accurate for that (work experience / projects). On the other hand, Tinder is for social interactions, and people will just find thing to talk about. Also, the Facebook interest graph isn't the most accurate. Same goes with mutual friends. Mutual connections in business (think passive intros) Cary more weight than Facebook friends. Big fan of Weave... Great unofficial interview @rrhoover & @zealoustiger

Niv, thanks for the kind words. I'm glad it's been working for you. The professional angle definitely helps make it more... professional. :)