The Teardown
Tuesday, December 4th
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Another Way To Meet: Greet
I often pose a simple scenario to friends: you enter a room full of one-hundred random people, and your goal is to make connections. Does this scenario cause you to retreat and flick frantically through Instagram to calm your nerves, or do you immediately charge forward on a monster wave of euphoria? More often than not, the first response occurs. If you’re like me, you follow the second path. There is something genuinely fun about what you’re about to do. Try using the terms “crypto” or “blockchain” to attract the initial audience, and then start talking about something totally different.
Many of us go through this experience in our professional lives, but we don’t often do so outside of work. We have plenty of valuable friends. We tell ourselves we don’t care about socializing and meeting others. A perfectly acceptable evening involves popping open a bottle of wine with a few friends and discussing Making A Murderer, or Ali Wong's latest comedy special, or if you’re me, telling someone about the newest baby poop you’ve seen and cleaned and how enormous and stinky it was.
That said, folks with and without friends alike sometimes want to meet people outside of their 1st and 2nd-degree networks. They want to practice their social skills. They miss the rush of talking with someone new. Often, they’re just new to a particular place and don’t yet know anyone else. Enter, Greet. Disclaimer: NYC only, for now.
Greet is a service that organizes hangouts for groups of people who don’t already know each other. Users answer numerous questions focused on their motivations and preferences and craft a short bio. Greet’s magical AI (i.e., a human) polishes the bio with some extra humor and often better spelling and grammar.
To be clear, Greet didn’t offer to sponsor this note. Instead, I spotted the service a few months ago. I’ve spent plenty of time in my past meeting people through electronic channels and wanted to understand how the space evolved since then.
I typed up an uninspiring bio and selected my availability for the week. Here’s what my future friends read:
Ping! You might have just gotten an email newsletter from Chris, who enjoys writing about a variety of topics that interest him. His myriad of interests have led him down the path of unconventional career choices, which is why he’s able to speak to natural disasters so well despite being an actuary right now. A couple of things to add to his list of hobbies include photography and composing electronic music.
Yawning yet? Great. I’m sure they did too. I scowled at my inability to say anything interesting in so few words. Maybe I should have added tidbits like “used to love Real Housewives of Atlanta” and “once dressed as Tom Cruise in Risky Business on a 20-degree Halloween night.
Greet confirmed the location, time, and provided the other bios. My future friends seemed, well, interesting. One was the creator of the Do Better Box activism t-shirt (a millennial thing, I’m sure), another biked the entire Great Wall of China, and a third enjoyed ballroom dancing. A fourth was a UX designer for the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CPFB).
That night, only two of the other five showed up. One had canceled in advance, but two others didn’t warn anyone ahead of time. So, three of us had a couple rounds of drinks and pizza.
The experience was fantastic. I made a joke that one of the two must be a rocket scientist, and he subsequently replied “I am.” Woops! Have you ever met a rocket scientist? I hadn’t. We talked about newsletters, books, rockets, designing interfaces for the CFPB, and insurance. I told them one motivation for trying the service was sourcing material and stories for this newsletter. Once the night was over, we rated the overall experience as well as each other. When two people evaluate each other positively, the likelihood of being matched for a subsequent event grows.
I think there is a market for a service like Greet. Until recently, we found adult-age friends via intramural sports teams, or hit-or-miss Meetup.com groups, or work. Greet fills the gap between those experiences and awkwardly making friends through dating apps by providing enough transparency about the people you’re about to meet and coalescing everyone together at a cool location rather than a run-of-the-mill dive bar. Not everyone will be like you, or like you as person, and you won’t immediately become best friends, but that’s OK. If nothing else, the experience gives us the ability to practice taking a risk. It’s good to get out of your comfort zone.
Still No FOMO For Facebook
I wanted to provide some brief follow-up to my last newsletter. I wrote about Facebook’s Portal and my view on the market opportunity:
More importantly, is there a market for this device? My belief is no, and my brief breakdown follows next.
As best I can understand, the market for stationary devices is frothy. Numerous legacy and more modern competitors are fighting for a type of interaction that seems as antiquated as ever: stationary-device video calling between consumers.
Several subscribers were confused: was I saying a market exists or not? If the latter, why did I provide numerous examples of products in that market. The confusion is warranted. I think the opportunity exists, but it is small. I’m not convinced that most people are severely inconvenienced by video-chat user experiences on mobile devices, and again, you can buy a very cheap stand for your phone or tablet. Also, don’t forget that laptops that sit flat on surfaces have video-calling applications.
The Substack Experiment
I delivered previous newsletters using MailChimp. Starting with this newsletter, I’m trying something different: management and delivery via Substack. Axios put together a brief but interesting piece highlighting the business. I’m experimenting for the following reasons:
Ensuring the aesthetics of this newsletter are consistent across all consumption methods. MailChimp is more powerful, but I spent too many weekend hours tweaking fonts and received more than one “you’re always on your computer” comment from my lovely wife. Substack allows me to focus on thinking, analyzing, and writing
Supporting a young Y-Combinator-backed company focused on the puzzle pieces that matters most: developing and writing content. MailChimp is great for distribution but terrible as a destination. Medium sucks. WordPress is overkill, for now.
Joining an ecosystem of other writers breaking from established content destinations to create their own publications. Lots of them look interesting. See here and here for examples.
Let me know what you think. On that note…
Comments / Intro To The Teardown Talk
More than a few of you provide feedback on my writing style and send undying love and admiration for my content. These tidbits arrive at my virtual doorstep via email, holy iPhone blue bubbles (i.e., text message), and WhatsApp.
Keep the love flowing. I am immensely joyful when I receive feedback. It means you read the content and want to further the conversation. With that in mind, I’m firing up out a Slack group.
If you’re unfamiliar with Slack, well, what the hell are you doing with your life? Crawl out from under that rock and stop signing restaurant bill with perfect cursive handwriting. The Slack group gives us the power to talk to each other directly, or in a group setting, and set up sub-groups (“channels”) to discuss particular topics rather than bombard the general chat with conversation other than animated GIFs (“gift” not “jiff”) of laughing babies and cats that look like tigers. Numerous Slack groups are tremendously valuable to me
You can join the group by clicking the link below. To be clear, you do not need to download the Slack app (iOS, Android) to join the group. However, the app provides a clearer path to avoiding everything else in your life and regularly commenting on my posts. Go forth and Slack!