Reciprocity Community: 2019 Year in Review

Summary

Vision

We’re building Reciprocity into the best way to catalyze productive connections within a community.

We want a world where every potential productive connection between people is discovered and acted upon, and we believe intelligently matching Asks and Offers for advice, connections and resources is the best way to achieve those goals.

If you haven’t checked out our app, you can join our Demo Community here.

2019 Recap

In 2019, we ran 4 paid pilots and learned that our platform is most successful with communities of 100+ people, with an active community manager and members whose goal is to grow professionally through learning and making new connections. Corey Breier joined as cofounder in August to lead biz-dev and marketing, rounding out Amit’s background in product and engineering.

2020 Focus

Entering 2020, our focus is now on iterating the product to fully integrate our learnings and then hitting the gas on sales, specifically targeting startup accelerators and entrepreneurship classes. Get in touch if you can connect us with an org that would benefit from Reciprocity!

Fundraising

We aim to build this startup into a profitable, self-sustaining business in 2020. We can do that with $100k in investment and we’d like your help identifying angels aligned with our mission.

Read on for details on our journey and goals for 2020, as well as offers for help from our team to you!

Table of Contents

Pilot Outcomes
Member Learnings
Customer Development Learnings
Product Updates and Roadmap
Fundraising
Current Goals
Personal Updates
Thanks
Our Asks and Offers for Help

Pilot Outcomes

In 2019, we had 4 paid pilots totaling $7k in revenue:

• A one-day, 2x/year conference for women leaders in Silicon Valley, with 200 attendees (planning to use us again for June 2020 event)
• A 2-quarter experiential class on entrepreneurship, with 180 students (also using for Winter Quarter)
• A Middle School, based in NYC, using us for their 40-member teaching staff (also using for Winter Quarter)
• An alumni program for graduates of a Stanford GSB course

The entrepreneurship class was our most successful use case. In the mid-course survey, 38% of students “got value” from the tool, 67% answered an Ask and 45% wanted to continue using Reciprocity. Learn more in this Case Study about why they reported 4x the value over existing solutions.

Our takeaways are that successful groups:

Require an active “community organizer” to encourage signup, initiate new members and help make connections.

Integrate Reciprocity into an in-person activity or curriculum to get the flywheel spinning. We saw little engagement in groups where Reciprocity was simply introduced over email without an active push from community admins (as in the alumni and conference pilots).

Benefit from being time-bound, which incentivizes members to take advantage of connections while they have them.

Member Learnings

We interviewed dozens of end-users (who we call ‘members’) of our pilots, and our main takeaways are:

1. Members need immediate visibility into their community’s posts. We erred too far on the side of “not bothering” our members by only sending them emails for direct replies to their posts. But members let us know they want to see all posts from other members through notifications where they’re already paying attention: email, phone, Slack. Currently, we require web app login to learn of new posts, so we’re causing our members to miss opportunities for help. To address this, we’re working on thorough coverage of activity with email notifications, integration into Slack, and native iOS and Android apps.
2. Members need insight into the “culture” of the community to figure out what to post. A common question we hear from members is “What kind of posts make sense to put in here?” They want to learn what the common asks and offers are to help guide them in knowing what sort of thing is okay to post. Many are more than willing to Ask and Offer once an appropriate option is presented to them. We need to help them identify which parts of their life history are appropriate to Offer, and how to structure their Asks in a way that invites quick resolution rather than many back and forths.
3. Members want to help their communities. They say it’s “fun” and “feels good” to help fellow community members and affirm the need for a tool like Reciprocity to slice through the noise of conventional social networks and break down the vulnerability of asking for help. Some have thanked us for showing them what their friends needed. This confirms a hypothesis we have around members being intrinsically generous.

A few other learnings:

• Members feel jilted when they reply to an Ask and don’t receive a response. We will add reminders for Askers to respond to each reply.
• Tabling outside pilot classroom offering homemade cookies to get user feedback is far more effective than digital outreach!

A few select quotes from members:

“Reciprocity allowed the connection and I walked away feeling nurtured, connected, and purposeful. I feel empowered to be surrounded with like-minded souls seeking connection.”

“Oftentimes, I’m extremely hesitant to post [to email listservs] due to fear of spamming people’s inboxes.”

“My staff use Reciprocity to voice concerns, unique skills they have, to connect with folks in an environment and space and time that they would not have had otherwise. It’s an opportunity for the ask and offer to come out without me as the boss being involved as the intermediary.”

Customer Development Learnings

Our customer development goals in 2019 were to investigate the market’s need across our four target verticals: student/alumni groups, coworking spaces, event organizers, and HR professionals.

We learned that some of these groups weren’t willing to pay for a culture tool like ours, except for the accelerator/incubator directors who resonated with better member management.

We talked to dozens of potential customers across those 4 verticals with responsibilities ranging across adjectives like ‘community, portfolio, batch, cohort, marketing, operations’ and across roles like ‘director, manager, lead, vice president’.

Vertical-specific takeaways:

Coworking spaces say community is a priority for them, but spend on it only through front desk salaries and free food for event budgets. Their margins are razor thin.

Alumni development groups are bureaucratic and unlikely to change tools without a black and white cost savings opportunity.

HR folks are cautiously optimistic about this affecting retention, culture, referrals, and recruiting. They simply need to know where it fits in next to existing HR apps.

Most event organizers only spend on line items that increase sponsorships or ticket sales.

Most of the potential customers we spoke to:

Were loath to introduce another app to their group, but welcomed integrations into their existing communications tools

Struggled with finding ways to get their group actively engaged with each other without the administrator doing things manually

Said they valued ‘culture’ but lack clear metrics for it (using proxies like posts or replies or self reported value) and therefore seek guidance on where to invest money to increase culture

We learned that our ideal customers are responsible for a group:

• Over 100 members in size (and therefore unmanageable manually)
• Who primarily interacts with each other online, but also via live events
• Oriented around a professional interest (role, industry, job, etc)
• That comes together for a limited time (around an event, as part of a cohort, etc)
• For which there is some financial transaction involved (whether members paying for access or organization investing in members, etc) that drives incentive to invest in member relationship-building

Our pitch most resonated as the promise to:

Allow a community manager to effectively service a larger group than they would be able to manually

Allow any community manager to more effectively foster group engagement and connections without 100% of the burden being on their shoulders

Allow a non-community manager role to effectively manage a community without negatively impacting their primary role responsibilities

These are promising findings! If we can integrate with existing tools, prove that Reciprocity groups engage more, and quantify more direct culture metrics, we have ourselves a business.

That’s why our focus in 2020 is on finding community managers for startup accelerators and entrepreneurship classes, as their realities best line up with the ideals above.

Can you introduce us to any startup accelerators or entrepreneurship classes with 100–1000 members? Please do!

A few select quotes from interviews:

“We built our own social network to match asks and offers, but I still lack the bandwidth to educate SMART asks and manually facilitate such requests. I tried Notion and it didn’t work — Reciprocity looks like a great tool to test with our mentorship program in 2020.” — Community Lead at VC firm

“We just rolled out a Slack/Airtable community platform in September but engagement hasn’t been as high as I’d like. I lack the bandwidth to manage that community as my main role is in marketing. Let me check with our managing partner about using Reciprocity — this looks like just what we need.” — Director of Marketing for VC Portfolio

“We tried MightyNetworks but nobody engaged on it, so we’re switching back to Slack as it’s more integrated in people’s workflows. I’d love to try Reciprocity for our portfolio as soon as you have a Slack integration. In an ideal world every entrepreneur is asking and offering on our platform.” — Portfolio Director at Accelerator

Product Updates and Roadmap

In 2019, we completed the following product updates:

• Completely redesigned the web application for better legibility and UX on desktop and mobile
• Introduced an onboarding wizard to guide members in getting their first posts up
• Added ability to @mention another user in a reply, triggering email notification to them
• Added “Thank You” button on replies to close the loop on Asks. Lets Reciprocity know the status of an Ask and also will become the basis of our recognition system
• Improved speed of core user actions by 80%
• Added metrics tracking and reporting for core user actions
• Added automated test coverage for ~15% of backend codebase
• Dozens of bug fixes around stability, onboarding, notifications, mobile experience

In 2020, it’s time to incorporate all of our learnings so we can take the product out of beta. We have an offshore dev shop lined up, and with Amit overseeing engineering work, we’ve scoped a 3-month product roadmap that we anticipate will unlock new customers. This will cost $40k-$60k.

The particulars of the product roadmap follow from our “member learnings” as follows:

Members need more immediate visibility into their community’s posts

• Email notifications with clear CTAs for every new post, with options for “digest” style emails.
• Slack integration, native iOS and Android app

Members need more insight into the “culture” of the community to figure out what to post

• Showcase resolved Asks and common tags when entering first Ask and Offer in onboarding
• Show potential matches ASAP in onboarding process, based on first-entered profile information

Scaling

Members expect a more polished product. In 2019, we prioritized speed of development to validate ideas. Now it’s time to get the product “production-ready”: reliable, scalable, and fast. This means the following backend updates:

• Load-tested servers
• Migration of select components to AWS
• Greater automated test coverage

Give admins greater insight and engagement tools

• Metrics Reports (around engagement, keywords, etc)
• Suggest connections to members
• Newsletter authoring with post embeds

Stickiness/Growth

• “Sharable Posts”: allow users to mark their Asks as sharable, so other members can export them and share to their other networks over email, Slack, FB, other groups on Reciprocity
• Reputation System

If you’re interested in the details, ask us for our full product roadmap.

Fundraising

Our goal with Reciprocity is to build a profitable, self-sustaining business that abides by the principles of stakeholder capitalism. We want to raise just enough money to get us off the ground, and avoid the standard “VC money” path that pressures startups into pursuing exponential growth above all other values.

We’ve seen that path poison too many companies, and we believe it’s possible to build a profitable business while truly doing right by customers, employees, shareholders, and communities. We’re a lean software company led by a software architect, and we intend to take advantage of our low capital needs.

We aim to raise $100k, with a max of $300k. $40k is the minimum we need to move the needle: that is what we need to pay the software shop to complete the product roadmap outlined above. Above that will fund founder salaries, but Amit and Corey are able to sustain themselves through freelance income if needed.

We’re looking for a funding option that provides a path for returns to investors that doesn’t assume future funding or an exit, but still retains optionality for future funding. We’re selecting between the Indie.vc Agreement, convertible notes, or crowd equity funding.

We’ve had many conversations with interested angels and friends & family over the past few months. As of writing we have $30k+ of committed money from this group — just about enough to engage the development shop.

Get in touch if you can help us navigate fundraising or if you’re interested in investing! We’re happy to share financial projections and other details.

Current Goals

• Close the money!
• Iterate product to “public launch” in Q2 2020
• Prepare outreach database/machine of customers to contact once product is ready
• Hire interns to structure the AI/NLP aspects of the database and assist with UX of upcoming features
• Raise pilot KPIs: Asks, Replies, and Offers. In support of Resolved Asks overall!

Personal Updates

• Amit moved to Dublin in the East Bay from Menlo Park, and Corey commutes halfway to Oakland to cowork once a week, or they meet at his co-op in SF.
• Corey did the OnDeck accelerator and it helped us greatly with financing advice, customer development, and best practices for early stage companies

Thanks specifically to

• All our supportive customers!
• Jay Finch for financial advice
• Jim Schachterle for branding advice
• Jesse Biroscak for customer interviews advice
• Ryan Serviatus via OnDeck for pricing advice
• Stephanie Chand and Kate Lee for being passionate user advocates
• Lyndsey Boucherle for motivational advice

Our Asks for Your Help

Seeking introductions to:

• Administrators of 100–1000 member accelerators or entrepreneurship classes.
• Angel investors who value community as part of their thesis.

Please run any introductions by us so we can opt-in and send you a forward-able blurb.

Seeking guidance on:

• How to get member biographies into the platform without friction.
• Whether it’s worth exploring a freemium pricing model.

Our Offers to Help You

• Amit’s happy to help you scope a tech project, set up your Squarespace, bake delicious cookies or build wood furniture!
• Corey can help around marketing, sales funnels, remote work, hiring freelancers and successful coliving arrangements.

Thanks for reading! What else would you like to see in updates like this as they become monthly?