(not another)Virtual Reunion
On the 20th of February, we’re organizing a virtual reunion to bring together members of the St. Stephen’s community, in specific, those who studied with me and graduated in 2013. You can sign up for it here
We’re doing this as a part of RolodexAI’s bigger mission to help people stay connected to those they don’t meet that often. You can find more details of the event here and I wanted to use this to deep dive into why we decided to do this and the series of events that led us to this.
Connecting people is really hard
Over the last 2 weeks, we’ve not been very successful at connecting people 1:1. This was mainly due to high friction in user experience and scheduling nightmares! Also what made it exponentially harder is that the community is quite small and catering to everyone’s preferences was nearly impossible
Solving for awkwardness
Some of the community members saw value in what we were trying to build and after a rather slow week, offered some valuable suggestions. Apart from scheduling and UX, awkwardness around meeting someone after ages was another reason why people weren’t going out of their way to show up for these meetings. Doing some sort of icebreaker before the call or doing group calls were 2 things we heard from the community.
Voila! A Reunion
We shifted gears and tried to create an experience that solved for awkwardness. I’m fortunate to be a part of 2 online communities (Entrepreneur First and Ondeck) and had seen how these communities solved this problem. So we took a page from their book. We set up an event (using Luma) and rather than doing a simple Zoom call (which is what most of these events are), we’re doing a 30 mins icebreaker session followed by a 30 mins virtual room where you could talk to whoever you like!
By solving for initial awkwardness (using the icebreakers) and creating group conversations (using the virtual room), our hunch is that it might actually solve the problems faced by the community.
This post might be premature as only time will tell if this actually works, but I wanted to throw more light to members of the community on why we decided to do a reunion. Given the recent history, I’m sure that people have had their fair share of “virtual reunions” and “happy hours” and thus my intention behind writing this is to, hopefully, convince you that this isn’t another zoom call with 30 people.
If you’ve made it this far (and are part of the St. Stephen’s 13 community) you can sign up here 👇🏽
A big thank you to the community for their kind messages and suggestions!
