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Signed up. Excited to try it, and In other thoughts…
Depending on the quality and connection made per match, I'd be happy to meet one new friend across the globe in a year, rather than 12—even if half work out, thats going to lead to a lot of work to maintain these new connections, especially when it's solely on you to keep the conversation going. Meaning, without a scheduled interaction such as work, school, gym, etc. the connection can easily fizzle away. Which leads me to my second thought.
Email is cluttered as it is, have you considered building a communication platform into your product to maintain the conversations? Seeing as how I may never meet this connection in the physical world, having a centralized location for our interactions may help perpetuate the connection. Especially if your communication platform integrates systematic reminders to say "hello", propose a specific question each month to keep the discussion going, or simply to say "what's your new friend been up to this month?"
Just some initial thoughts. again, very excited about this.
lex
@lexevan Thanks for your feedback and your remarks. It's definitely something we are considering. We just need some more data to find the right orientation. All your remarks are totally right. It's even hard to maintain contact with my old friends that maintaining it with people I'm just starting to know might be even harder!
I am still wondering what actual value would this product have for me? If I "get in the mood of meeting new people" I could go to a bar, meetup, show, community related events that I find interesting like gaming or rpg's or whatever.
What is the need or pain you are solving with enabling random people to discover other random people? It is like you are trying to bundle the value of a community, but than again to me it's not clear what value you produce out of this unbundling?
@jodoron Thanks for your remark. We highly appreciate.
What we want to do is connect you to people you wouldn't have met if you had stayed in the communities that you're interested in, it is a way for you to discover new things without investing too much time since the first contact is done by email. You already know that you like gaming, but maybe you have an undiscovered passion. Another thing we had in mind when making Happenstance is that It isn't easy for everyone to simply go out there and meet new people when you don't have time, or simply are shy, this would be a nice way for you to expand your circle.
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I love the thinking behind this concept but here's my thesis: people want to think they are open to meeting anybody but really they want to meet pretty specific types of people. If you can build your brand around the former but technically nail the latter through some form of personality/demographic profiling and learning over time you may have something pretty cool. Looking forward to signing up.
@davieball Thanks! Pretty good analysis! You're right about people looking for similar/specific people but what makes it even more interesting is when they're slightly different (maybe a different culture, or a different background). I think we'll have to go through a pretty steep learning curve here.
We created happenstance because we wanted to meet new interesting people, with no other purpose than sharing thoughts, ideas, and life experience. We had that burning desire to expand our world, and to discover the lives and adventures of other people we don’t know yet. We couldn't help but wonder about all those amazing souls we might share something with if only we got to meet them.
Although the internet is pretty great for finding jobs, dates, and old friends, there is no service that would allow us to meet some random people, who are obviously cool, and curious just like you and I.
With Happenstance, we want to allow everyone to meet someone new, and different, but yet kind of similar. Maybe a teacher from Japan, or a student in Europe, or a traveler in Asia, or a journalist from Africa, or a gardener, or a dentist, or an archeologist, or a professional gamer, or...well you get it.
Simplicity is key here. Meet one person/month just out of curiosity. Not job-related, no booty call, no meet-your-next-cofounder, just curiosity.
The possibilities are endless, and we cannot wait to meet all of you.
Welcome Product Hunters :)
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I'm really excited by this project. The world needs more stuff like this.
@yoann_lopez, I was wondering how you are going to make sure whether the people you are matching together are active or not. I realize that there is greatness in wanting to get out of the picture once you have made an introduction, but how will you know that you are matching people that are both active, at least in some sense of the word anyway. Of course, it may be that someone's introduction is not that inspiring and the other person does not want to connect. But i guess some kind of etiquette might count for something at some point.
Anyway, still excited and looking forward to more fun here :)
@andy_roddam Thanks Andy! You're totally right, it's something we will want to track really soon, we have to be able to tell who's engaging and who's not. Right now, by email it's really hard to do and not scalable at all so we're working on a different way to address this issue :) Stay tuned!
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@yoann_lopez Brilliant. Looking forward to that :)
I like meeting new people and I tried some services that introduces you to random ones on the internet. The problem is that people misuse such services and make them look like porn chat rooms. Without monitoring the system and excluding such people the service will remain un-usable for some who's really looking forward to meet interesting people.
@themsaid Thanks for your comment! You're totally right, I've been on such kind of services and was disappointed as well. We're working on an easy way to monitor and exclude people who don't match the values of the service.
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Interesting
Just signed up. I'm looking forward to getting started. I feel this has the potential to span out globally. Excited to see how this pans out!
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