SXSW — A Bumble business experience!
I’m really enjoying Austin, Texas and SXSW, but my experiences have ranged from great talks, great networking and of course some awesome entertainment. My important first day, had me take the Metro Rail into downtown — past a warehouse that has a huge Bumble sign on it. This reminded me from our research while ideating for our client GoodIntro, that Bumble actually has a business section.
Now when I tried it in Newcastle, it had literally about 5 or 6 users on there, maybe it would be different in Austin? It was. Seemingly a lot of people thought to try this out, and my first non pre planned business meeting was booked. Michael from Rock Sauce Studios, the event host and all round awesome person, connected with me, messaged me and arrange an intimate networking event within an hour.
The networking dinner was at a great restaurant that I would have never found otherwise, called Italic. Six of us around a table, it went better than most networking events as we all have a relaxed environment where we can clearly communicate in turn and introduce ourselves.
I currently have an additional 5 meetings planned with people for before I leave that have all came from Bumble biz while here. I got thinking that really, Bumble Biz works like a dream for an event like this. A flash event, where you have a high volume of users suddenly all looking to network within a short space of time. It’s like a free for all for business meetups. But, it only works this well because of the ‘one-off’ scenario, the festival atmosphere helps with the ‘screw it-lets do it’ / ‘why the heck not’ attitude. People want to make the most of the finite time while the festival is on, Bumble Bizz is allowing them to do this.
Now, in true SXSW fashion, the night before was a serendipitous “have you heard of this party” type moment — at Bumble! HAIM were the guests and they are a favourite of mine. The event setup, was amazing, tons of people turning up to get together and party. We found out about the event from photographer Thomas Jackson, who happens to be both a hugely talented photographer and the man in the know, at SXSW. It’s crazy to think that 30 minutes before we arrived, we had no idea it was even happening. This flash moment experience was a great one, and it’s only fitting it was created by Bumble, facilitating large quantities of new meetings, of all kinds.
Now, having lots of meetings does not mean having lots of useful meetings. Obviously, you have no idea whether the connection you have made will be mutually valuable or useful and I’ve met some great people whom I highly doubt I will work with in the future, but I have made some great connections for me and our business. The pool of people your connecting with, I truly believe is at a higher quality density here at SXSW, due to the nature of the beast. But after SXSW, what’s the reason for being on something like Bumble Biz? Don’t get me wrong, I have loved it, but I still can’t see me using it in the same way once I return to the UK. The flaw is, outside of SXSW, I don’t go on “business dates”. Thankfully, I really truly believe that GoodIntro.com will really shake up the business networking world.
This experience has made me more excited about the solution that Layers has proposed as an outcome of the ideation work we carried out for Goodintro.
Goodintro will help you find, match and meet valuable connections
for you and your business.
The team at Goodintro are currently going through a funding round, so everything about the project is still being kept a secret, but we hope not only that the project gets kicked off soon, but that we get to continue to work on it as it is a product that would really excite our own team.
