Congregate — Re-imagine Virtual Gatherings
Builder’s Incupation Program Recap
Why Congregate?
Currently, millions of college students, business professionals, and friends can’t gather in large groups. Zoom is good for single-host presentations for static audiences, not for jumping naturally between conversations and scheduling large conferences which is critical for the 1M+ networking events in the US annually. Congregate allows event hosts to schedule large conferences (main speaker, networking, sponsor tables, etc) while also re-imaging social gatherings with users fluidly moving in a physical space, just like in person.
For online event hosting, users want a product that closely replicates the structure and spontaneity of in person interactions. This requires redesigning the UI/UX around video calling from the ground up which competitors like Zoom are reluctant to do: adding a physical/spatial experience and low friction in entering/leaving conversations. We’re starting with tables which users can jump between, and moving towards custom designed lobbies (e.g. dining hall for student common spaces, business lounge for HBS/conferences etc) with users represented by avatars navigating using their mouse to spontaneously encounter other users, just like in real life.
Enter Congregate, an online events platform for dynamic social gatherings.
Our Journey
March: Prototyping
Congregate started out of simple dorm room ideation as an alternate platform to Zoom for hosting networking events. As a leader of a VC club, these were from of mind for me. After creating initial mock ups, we realized the site’s table design would be great for office hours, a low cost, easily accessible quick iteration ground. Our team sprinted over Spring Break. Here was our first design (I didn’t know Figma at the time, so made 100% in PowerPoint).
The team had to make many design decisions, from our tech stack to (most importantly) our video provider. After many (non-trivial) internal discussions, we decided on a React front-end and Ruby back-end due to familiarity, and Jitsi as a quick, free, open source provider with an easily accessible API.
April: University gatherings and office hours
After building an MVP, we went out to Harvard office hours to test out Congregate (thank you Harvard CS department).
Despite positive reception from pilots with a dozen courses, we realized that courses were largely set with their own online education tech stacks, which were difficult to shake mid-semester.
We further tested Congregate with incoming freshmen from a few schools as a virtual visiting day alternative. While users liked the idea of the platform, there were still many bugs which took away from the user experience. Don’t be fooled by the glamorous UI in the MVP — many features (e.g. chat, attendee monitoring) were yet to be implemented and others were not yet robust.
May: Transition to targeting businesses
After the school year concluded, we pivoted to business-oriented events which would offer larger events and higher returns to cover our costs. Investors particularly liked Congregate for their online demo days, which naturally mapped onto Congregate’s table interface.
June: Continued iteration on business users
Seeing promise in the small-medium sized events space for business/entrepreneurial gatherings, we reached out to users in this space and hosted events with users like HBS. We faced reasonable competition in the space from players like Remo.co and Hopin.to who were first movers. We knew the market was fragmented so business gatherings were viable at a small scale, but a new target niche might be more fruitful (e.g. take a look at yaatly.com which makes an online debate platform).
July: Eventual return to education
Following more iteration in the business space, we realized marketing to users beyond our immediate network was not trivial. After some time, Congregate began to get a lot of inbound interest among educators for academic conferences, school social spaces, and virtual classrooms. Throughout July, we hosted academic events with partners like the NSF and the Opical Society of America.
However, inbound from educators particularly increased after Congregate was the first response to a viral tweet.
This interest largely took our team by surprise. However, we deliberately designed the platform to generic enough that it could be customized to many use cases, which allowed users to customize the site to their needs and organically show us what use cases were unmet.
While there is strong demand from educators for interactive classrooms, we realized there are also tangential uses for Congregate in school/University settings which mirror traditional business use cases (e.g. career fairs, conferences, large social events). Recognizing the demographic our team is most familiar with is education, we’re reemphasizing education use cases, within and outside of the classroom.
Where do we go from here?
Congregate for Events
Remember the original mock up? Congregate looks very different 16 weeks later.
Since we’ve still seen interest from conference/event hosts, this version will still be used to host events.
Congregate for Education
Noticing increased demand from educators, but also acknowledging their limited school budgets, we put together Congregate Classroom. This is a free version for educators which uses the same Congregate tech stack but a lower cost video provider so we can afford to offer the site for free. We look forward to seeing what the reception of this site will be.
Custom Spaces
Going back to our roots, our team is still passionate about helping virtual interactions and we believe common spaces are the beginning. If Harvard or other schools need custom common spaces, we’d love to help. Hopefully, we can make something like this a reality in the future.
We’re excited for what the future holds.
Lastly, thank you to BIP
We would be remiss to not thank the HCS BIP program which has been instrumental in helping Congregate grow. BIP has helped equip us with mentors (shout out to Tony Hu) and foster a community of entrepreneurs. Thank you especially for supporting innovation at this critical time. We started Congregate out of our Harvard dorm largely personal need and are thankful for the support the community has given so far.
Written by Bryan Lee (bryan@congregate.live)
