Launching Cohort 🚀

Helping you unlock the potential of your professional network

Today we are launching Cohort — a new way to understand and access the value of your meaningful relationships. [Cohort is available in the App Store]

The world is no longer a place where professional and personal relationships need to be kept separate. Throughout our careers, we build up a number of friendships, with people who share our common interests and values — these are not just people you know professionally. They have become friends.

It is this group of people that form your base. These are the people who are motivated to help you. These are the people who you want to see succeed.

This is not the same group of hundreds or thousands of LinkedIn contacts. Nor are they the people you’re friends with on Facebook, but haven’t seen in years. (But you know what they had for dinner last night!)

No, these are people who “know people”. They are people who you trust to be able to give you advice, or make a warm introduction on your behalf. They are people you have spent time with. If they called and asked for your help, you’d jump at the chance.

They are your cohort, and together you can do great things.

How Cohort works

Cohort helps you find the people you need through the people you already know and trust — your cohort.

It does this by conducting network analysis, detecting areas of interest and potential expertise, by looking at publicly available data, all packaged up neatly in an easy-to-use mobile app.

So when you’re looking for access to advice, insight or someone in particular, you can search Cohort and find out who you know, who can help.

Product walk through

Sign up with Twitter and Cohort will suggest people you know well enough to ask a favor of, so you can start building your cohort of trusted relationships.

We think of favors as a measure of social capital, as an indicator of relationship strength. If you can ask a favor of someone it likely means that you have spent time with them, and are motivated to help them.

From there, you can search for the things you need help with, or specific people you’re interested in meeting. Cohort makes helpful suggestions along the way, so you can refine your search.

Cohort then suggests who can help you, and how you can be introduced to them by people you have in common.

In a few short steps, you’re on your way to that warm introduction to someone who can help, by someone who knows you both.

Starting Point

What we’re launching with today is minimum, lightweight, and focused on relationships and interests. This is the starting point experience for what is to come.

Today we can help you understand the potential of your network. Tomorrow we will help you understand the potential of your team’s network.

Closing thoughts

I started working on Cohort a little over two years ago. About six months later, in November 2015, I brought the team together, to work on this thing called Cohort.

At the time we had some idea of what we were trying to achieve, and some idea of how we might go about doing that. But startups, as you probably know, are really just experiments.

Experiments in product development. Experiments in user experience. Experiments in data analysis. Experiments in architecture, tooling, marketing, customers, fundraising.

But mostly, experiments in people and time.

Do we have the right team? What can we do in the time we have?

Cohort’s mission is to help people be successful with each other. We want to take the hard work out of finding good people to collaborate with, and in doing so help you be better at what you do.

Cohort is available for download in the App Store, today. You can find out more about Cohort and the team on our homepage.

Follow us on Twitter — @CohortHQ