Reciprocity Community Q1 2020 Update

Summary

• We closed a new customer in the higher education space with 200 members.
• We updated the web app to improve user experience and activity notifications, give admins more insightful engagement tools, and to improve backend reliability and scalability.
• We hired 2 NLP interns and 1 UX intern.
• We missed fundraising goals due to market conditions but revamped product/hiring roadmaps to address by remaining lean and sustainable.
• We contacted all startup accelerators and MBA programs in the USA.
• We published a customer case study reporting four times more member value over spreadsheets.
• We’re offering free access through July 1st to communities affected by Coronavirus.

Vision Reminder

We’re building Reciprocity into the best way to catalyze productive connections within private communities.

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 that goal.

If you haven’t seen our app yet, you can join our Demo Community here.

Q1 Recap

In Q1, we closed a new higher-education customer, improved the product UX, opened a friends/family round, and hired some part-time team members. Coronavirus severely disrupted our fundraising efforts, but we remain undaunted and are consulting part-time to maintain our runway.

Update on Previous Goals

• Iterate product to “public launch” in Q2 2020: Partially achieved. We made a lot of progress on the product, but timeline for public launch pushed back to Q3 or later given slower bootstrap finances.
• Prepare outreach database/machine of customers to contact once product is ready: Achieved. 731 US accelerators and MBA programs outreach ongoing.
• Hire interns to structure the AI/NLP aspects of the database and assist with UX of upcoming features: Achieved. We have 2 new interns and are on track to have NLP-fueled tags and matches implemented this quarter.
• Raise customer KPIs: Asks, Replies, and Offers: On track. Our product updates are designed to drive these KPI’s and we will be measuring impact with our new customer.
• Close the money! Missed due to investors pulling out because of coronavirus market uncertainty. To address, we’ve revamped our product and hiring roadmaps to be more focused, lean and sustainable through bootstrapping until market conditions improve.

Customer Launch

We closed a new higher-education customer as part of their virtual replacement for their Admit Weekend. Reciprocity will be the tool that connects incoming students to current students, alumni and staff to get all of their questions about campus life and academics answered.

Product Updates

Implemented full coverage of activity (Direct Message, Reply, Mention, Thanks, Match, and Batched combinations thereof) with email notifications, with improved UX to simplify replying.

• Consolidated Ask/Offer categories based on most-used options: “Advice”, “Connections”, “Stuff”
• Tracking counts of each tag for each community in service of displaying “Common Tags”
• Support customized logo, welcome screen, and headers for each Community
• Whitelist/blacklist functionality beyond private join URLs
• Added rich text to community admin announcements and ‘sends as email’ to all members

These add up to significant progress on the goals defined in the product roadmap mentioned in the last update: giving members more visibility into their community, giving admins more insightful engagement tools, and making the backend more reliable, scalable, and fast.

Q2 Focus

Entering Q2, our focus is on ensuring the new customer is a success, developing the product to support Slack and email integrations, and closing additional customers with startup accelerators and entrepreneurship classes.

Get in touch if you can connect us with an organization that would benefit from Reciprocity!

Product Roadmap

• Add new “Open Asks” view for community admins
• Rewrite websockets implementation for better scalability
• Redesign member dashboard for easier access to member directory, tags and announcements
• Add newsletter authoring for community admins with tools to embed Asks and Offers
• Support uploadable user profile pictures
• Slack integration

Customer Development

We published a case study detailing how one of our 2019 customers reported four times more member value over their previous spreadsheet solution.

We reached out to all the student organizations at Stanford, 192 startup accelerators, and 539 MBA programs in the United States offering our app for their use, as entrepreneurship classes and startup accelerators are the most similar programs to our successful customers.

We’re in talks with several of these groups now to use Reciprocity, which will result in more crucial user learnings and bug testing.

Coronavirus Response

We believe that people are strongest when we freely share our skills and resources with one another, and that Reciprocity can help maintain the ties that sustain a group’s strength.

In response to the coronavirus, we’re offering Reciprocity free through July 1 for new groups of fewer than 300 people.

Team

We brought on Will Dunlop and Thomas Lu as Natural Language Processing interns to improve our keyword-tag recommendation and ask-offer matching algorithm.

Right now, they’re working on implementing deep learning methods powered by text vectorization to bring data-driven intelligence to the product. This method converts words into numbers and matches similar words on number proximity, which will be a huge improvement over our existing MongoDB fuzzy text matching.

We brought on Sean Forquer as a limited-engagement UX intern, and he created compelling new designs for Matches and email notifications (which we’ve implemented) and a new dashboard layout that’s in the works.

Fundraising

We opened a friends and family round in Q1 to close investors who value profitable self-sustaining businesses without artificial pressures for hyper-growth.

We learned a lot about non-equity financing instruments through this process, with guides from Zebras Unite, the Greater Colorado Venture Fund, and Andrew Murray Dunn being indispensable resources.

We settled on a modified convertible note with revenue share (adapted from the Indie.VC instrument) because it provides clear paths to investor return in both exit and no-exit scenarios, and returns money more quickly than conventional equity scenarios.

When the coronavirus crisis hit, several of our interested investors pulled out due to market conditions. Undaunted, both Amit and Corey scaled up our freelancing consulting to maintain operating capital.

We’re still following our product development roadmap, albeit at a slower pace now that we lack development shop funds.

Our Ask and Offer

Ask: Connect us to administrators of any online community, specifically startup accelerators or entrepreneurship programs looking to make the most of our new all-virtual world.

Offer: Both of us are available for part-time consulting — Corey on growth marketing and Amit on full-stack development — and happy to do free consultation calls to offer help where we can.