SMS #6: Take the Work Out of Networking

Maintain relationships and never forget a birthday

In the Steal My Startup article series, I focus on demonstrating how to turn inconveniences into opportunities. My goal is solely to educate and entertain. Be aware, therefore, that I do little research into existing products/services — the business you are about to hear about may already have some competitors…

It’s your birthday? “Have a good one!”

Started a new position? “Wonderful!”

It’s your two-year work anniversary? “Congrats on 2 years!”

If you’ve used LinkedIn in recent months, you’re familiar with these generic congratulatory reactions. They’re the product of LinkedIn’s ‘reply suggestion’ feature — buttons you can press to send private messages or post public comments without typing a single word.

When this feature was first introduced, I wasn’t a fan…

Intelligent software has played a role in our daily communications for quite some time now. It started with ‘auto-correct’ in iMessage and quickly evolved into more sophisticated software like Gmail’s ‘smart compose’ feature.

Despite my pessimistic tone, I’ve (so far) adopted these features into my life with little resistance — except when iMessage autocorrects my favourite curse word to ‘ducking’…then, I feel like protesting.

So why am I broaching this topic? Because LinkedIn’s ‘reply suggestions’ feature isn’t simply correcting our spelling mistakes and finishing our thoughts; it’s homogenizing how we interact with each other. We’ve traded our authenticity for speed and convenience, to the point where most LinkedIn users respond to major milestones and achievements in their friends’ lives with buttons that say, “Congrats Nathan”.

It’s not all bad. While they may seem disingenuous to the recipient, these half-assed automated ‘reply suggestions’ often act as verbal tinder, helping to spark genuine conversations that would not have taken place otherwise.

It’s also important to remember that these features are introduced — and stick around — because, despite their tradeoffs, we want what they offer: an effortless way to build and maintain relationships in this fast-paced world. I just wish we didn’t have to pay for them with our authenticity.

There’s an opportunity here…

Our assumptions:

• People will continue to look for low-energy, time-efficient ways to manage their social lives.
• People want their social interactions to remain as genuine and personal as possible.

Before Reading On…Treat the information in this article as open-source — yours to use however you like! And if you’d like to learn more about getting your startup off the ground, consider downloading my free ebook, From Idea to Incubator here.

ELEVATOR PITCH 💬

Few people find Kanye West quotes relatable. But I think most would agree that this excerpt from his song, Real Friends, sums up the 21st-century experience quite nicely:

“When was the last time I remembered a birthday? When was the last time I wasn’t in a hurry?” — Kanye West

Your grandma remembers your birthday. She even remembers your phone number. But granny didn’t have to balance 4 social media accounts, a 50-hour workweek, and a side-hustle.

She didn’t even have YouTube…

Anthropologists agree that we, humans, have scarcely evolved in the past 7,000 years. Despite this fact, we continue to innovate and globalize at a rate beyond our individual capacity to adapt. Each day that passes is accompanied by a feeling that we have even more birthdays to remember; more thank you notes to send; more clients to shmooze.

This is where NotWork comes in — the app that takes the ‘work’ out of ‘networking’.

With features that externalize your mental reminders, prompt you when relationships grow weak and provide you with a suite of options for strengthening them, NotWork keeps you up to date with your personal network and in good standing with your professional network.

VALUE PROPOSITION💡

The NotWork app integrates with your calendar, email, messenger applications and call history to offer 3 core features:

Interaction Scheduling

“Remember to wish John for his birthday at midnight”

“Remember to send a ‘thank you’ email after that job interview”

“Remember to send Karen an encouraging text before her big presentation”

Lengthening your internal to-do list with these mental reminders can add an unnecessary amount of stress to your day-to-day life. Even worse is the feeling of guilt when, after juggling all these well-intentioned thoughts, you end up forgetting to follow through on most of them.

Consider, as well, all the times your schedule did not permit you to follow through on a social promise. What if you need to be in bed by 10 pm the night before John’s birthday? What if you have a meeting right after that job interview? What if Karen’s big presentation is during your big presentation?

You get the idea…

By syncing with your native contacts list and integrating with your various messaging platforms, NotWork provides you with multiple options for scheduling your interactions so you can clear up valuable headspace.

Reconnect Prompts

Dunbar’s Number is a suggested cognitive limit to the number of people with whom one can maintain stable social relationships. Researchers flip-flop on what this number truly is, but the vast majority agree it lies somewhere in the vicinity of 150 people.

My Facebook profile says my list of friends is above 1000, yet I talk to less than 30 of them on a regular basis — a number well below my capacity of 150 people.

Can you blame me? As the demands of work and life steadily increase, the number of people I choose to regularly keep up to date with dwindles. It might be natural, but that doesn’t mean it’s a good thing…

Besides the social fulfillment that comes with having a large group of friends, most professionals will tell you that the career benefits that result from a well-managed network are endless. In fact, a popular business adage is:

“Your network is your net worth”

So why rely on an impromptu (yet welcome) ‘long time no talk!’ text or an unexpected run-in at the mall to reconnect with an old friend?

This is where NotWork’s ‘prompt’ feature comes in. You can identify those of your friends you’d like to keep in regular contact with by adding them to your ‘inner circle’ and NotWork will use their email addresses, phone numbers (and other info you provide) to keep a log of your interactions with them.

If you’ve gone a while without sharing a calendar event or sending a text/email with a particular member of your ‘inner circle’, NotWork will prompt you to reconnect with them.

If you’ve provided the home address of members of your ‘inner circle’, NotWork will use your geolocation and travel itinerary (provided via email or calendar) to prompt you to reconnect with old friends in cities/countries you are traveling to.

In-App Gift Store

Physical gestures, like hand-written cards or sentimental gifts, are slowly being replaced by digital alternatives like automated ‘friend anniversary’ videos on Facebook and animated eCards. However, as physical gestures grow less common, they also grow more meaningful.

There’s little debating this fact. The feeling of receiving a text message from your significant other on your anniversary pales in comparison to receiving flowers at your office. Similarly, even the most heartfelt birthday post on your Facebook timeline has trouble competing with a hand-written birthday card delivered to your doorstep.

NotWork lowers the ‘effort barrier’ that deters you from performing thoughtful acts like these. It does so by offering an in-app ‘mailroom’ for cards, thank you notes, flowers, and other assorted gifts that can be mailed to your lucky recipient.

The NotWork ‘mailroom’ boasts two quick-and-easy methods for writing personal notes to accompany your gifts:

1. Typed. Users may type out a note to the recipient inside the app and customize the font.
2. Written. For a more personalized feel, users can write out their message on a piece of paper (or any other uniform background) and take a photo of it. This can then be automatically copied and pasted onto the selected card.

*See the Risks & Shortcomings section for the not-so-great aspects of these features

REVENUE STREAMS💰

How does it make money? There are a few monetization schemes I can think of for NotWork and, as always, identifying the best combination of revenue streams will require much more research and testing than I’ve done here.

I’ll present three different ideas in this article. Let me know which one you think is best.

Option 1: Monthly subscription with a 2-month trial

Most subscription services I’ve encountered have 7- to 14-day trials. This makes sense for these services because users will often sign up for their trial with the intention of using it immediately.

Why did she sign up for the LinkedIn premium trial? Because she’s looking for a job now. Why did he download the Adobe Photoshop trial? Because he feels like learning graphic design now.

Unlike with these services, a user’s activity on NotWork will be dictated by the activity of his/her network. A 2-month trial will likely overlap with a few special occasions (birthdays, anniversaries, holidays, etc.) providing potential applications for the new user.

Option 2: Freemium with subscription required for top feature(s)

This option also offers a trial period of unrestricted access to the app in its entirety but, after the trial has ended, it downgrades the user to a ‘free version’ rather than locking the user out completely.

Many very successful companies like Spotify use a freemium model. You may not be a paying user, but you are becoming familiar with the platform and building loyalty for the brand. When you can no longer put up with the watered-down version, you’ll upgrade to a premium subscription.

For the ‘free version’ of NotWork, I suggest restricting access to the app’s best feature. My assumption is that ‘interaction scheduling ‘(queuing texts, emails, etc. to send at specific times) will be the most favoured. The goal for the free version is to strike a balance between providing enough value to keep the user around, but less than is necessary to keep them satisfied long-term.

Option 3: It’s all free. Upsell with the in-app ‘mailroom’

This is the option I’m most on board with. Offer unrestricted access to the entire app and use those features as a hook to draw in a massive and engaged user-base. The sole revenue stream, in this case, would be the ‘mailroom’.

Push notifications, flash sales and other hooks can be used to upsell users a week or two in advance of friends’ birthdays, anniversaries, holidays and other special events.

RISKS & SHORTCOMINGS🤷🏽‍♂️

Every business idea has its risks and shortcomings. Here are some for NotWork

Apple, Google, and Facebook hold all the cards.

In an effort to reduce spam, Facebook recently revised its API so that 3rd party services cannot be used to post on personal Facebook accounts. This new development instantly made services like ‘Hootsuite’ and ‘Buffer’ a lot less valuable to individuals (like myself) who’d rather not make a business/fan page to promote their content.

NotWork will have to integrate with Google Calendar, Gmail, Facebook Messenger, as well as have access to a phone’s call log and text-messenger. If any of these services decide to revise their APIs, NotWork’s Value Proposition could be wiped out.

In fact, as things currently stand, I don’t believe it’s possible to schedule text messages unless you’re ok with your text being delivered from a different number than your own. Creative workarounds like this can surely be used to maintain features as policies and API’s change, but they come at great cost to the user’s experience.

The Mailroom feature will be VERY difficult to maintain

I expect the in-app gift store to be by far the most lucrative revenue stream and by far the most work…

Items that need to be customized (like cards and thank you notes) may need to be purchased wholesale from organizations like Hallmark and Carlton Cards and then altered in-house when a user orders them. For more worthwhile margins, NotWork may need to manufacture its own selection of cards — an operational nightmare.

Strong relationships will need to be made with local gift & flower delivery services as well. Since the range of these services is limited by geography, these offerings in the ‘mailroom’ tab of the NotWork app will need to be carefully scaled and monitored for scheduling and availability.

Used to its full effect, NotWork requires an ironic amount of work.

To be prompted by the app to reconnect with friends in cities you are traveling to, you will have to manually input the locations of your friends. Likewise, to send physical notes, cards, and gifts to your connections, you will need to provide the end recipients mailing address and any specific details for their delivery.

Prompts will be based on incomplete information.

How does NotWork account for every watercooler conversation at the office? Every unanticipated run-in at the mall? Every thread of comments left on a mutual friend’s picture?

Even for those connections who you do exclusively interact with via calls, texts, emails, and scheduled calendar events, NotWork has no method of judging the quality of these interactions. For the techies reading this who think that a ‘sentiment analysis’ AI (Artificial Intelligences that are trained to quantify the emotions behind pieces of content) could be a great judge of interaction quality, consider that NotWork would need access to the actual content of a user’s emails and messages — even if users consented to this, NotWork would be at the mercy of increasingly stringent privacy policies (discussed above).

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Until next time…