Manufacturing Serendipity
How meeting the right person led to a £500,000 business deal.
Sitting right where you are now, within the square mile there are more people that you don’t know than you do. It might sound obvious but this is one of the reasons we created Causr.
Hubs thrive as ecosystems develop and similar people are attracted to live and work in similar areas, from Silicon Valley in California to Silicon Roundabout in London. Whilst these hubs accelerate connectivity and the meetings of like-minds. Today this means that despite people being located closer together and more connections occurring, the number of opportunities that pass us by each day are increasingly missed.
This can be demonstrated by my recent trip to San Francisco, where every conversation on the Cal Train, in Coffee Shops, at Traffic Lights and on the Muni resulted in a useful connection that otherwise wouldn’t have happened — as each person acknowledged towards the end of each conversation.
As we continue to grow it’s great to meet people who have directly benefited from Causr. James Davies the CEO of Beyond Group shared with us his experience.
“I discovered Causr while on LinkedIn, it caught my attention and I’m delighted that I signed up. I was working from home one day and thought I would give it a go. The first person I came across was about in the same area as me. I thought I’d test things further and made initial contact and to my surprise got a friendly reply back. We were both working at home by coincidence on that day and we decided that we had a lot in common: my companies provide hiring, Mark needed hiring services and some advice. Amazingly, we met later that day near to where we live. The upshot: Mark’s division is fully staffed, we have a new account and.. we are friends and he’s even coming to my wedding! Business ‘connections do not come better’ — you couldn’t make it up! Causr is the missing link in terms of the relevance of LinkedIn and in my view, makes those ‘links’ real.”
In the follow up conversation we asked what the value of the connection was and this was the response:
1. I won a client that I otherwise would not have, the financial value of this over the 12 months since commencement of contractually engaging could be up to £500,000. It has the potential to be a £1m account for us.
2. I didn’t have to waste time at ‘another’ let down of a networking event and better still met someone locally that was handed to me on a plate.
3. The ‘hard work’ element of finding such a contact and engaging was essentially done for me. All this is helped by the fact that you are geographically in the same area — I think there is something psychologically appealing about this and a natural curiosity to engage with those you are curious about especially if nearby.
Whilst this story demonstrates the value of Causr providing users the permission, confidence and context to connect — it’s the location element that resulted in the face to face meeting that wouldn’t have been unlocked on another platform in the same way.
As Richard Branson said about us: ‘Technology should enable more in-person interactions, not reduce them.’ Good example here: https://goo.gl/hFh20O
Thank you James and all of our users who have joined us on the journey so far. If you’ve got a story about how you’ve used Causr to connect let us know it helps us know what we’re getting right and helps us towards our mission of creating millions of meaningful connections for people nearby, all around the world, everyday.
Causr is a location-based app that introduces its users to others within the local area. It makes finding nearby professionals with similar jobs, interests and ambitions easy. Scroll through a network of users, see who’s free, meet for coffee, share business advice or simply connect. Causr plans those chances encounters, and makes missed opportunities a thing of the past.
Download the App to see who’s nearby and start connecting today. Now available on the Apple App Store & Google Play Store.
