Reciprocity Community Q2 2020 Update

Engagement Tools in good company!

Summary

• Our current customer’s community is going strong (84 members, with 42% of members giving help, 30% receiving help, and 83% of asks receiving a reply), and they have decided to extend their contract to the end of 2020.
• We updated the web app to make it easier for members to discover relevant posts, manage their accounts and privately message other members. Admins now have improved engagement and reporting tools including the ability to email announcements to all members.
• We contacted 648 entrepreneurship professors in the United States.
• We were featured in Commsor’s community landscape tools infographic.
• We created a sales deck introducing the core features of the product.
• Our 2 AI interns completed work on NLP-driven automatic tagging.
• Our UX intern contributed to designing an upcoming reputation system.

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, view our product intro deck here.

Q2 Recap

In Q2, we developed additional admin features (listed below) based on feedback from our ongoing education customer, halted our fundraising push and started consulting for runway, and steadily improved the product’s UX and functionality.

Customer Update

The higher-education customer we closed last quarter has been ongoing these past few months and they have renewed their engagement until January 2021. Their community is using Reciprocity to connect incoming students with alumni to get their questions about campus life and academics answered.

We’re learning lots from their community needs, from a desire to recognize the most helpful members with gamification style badges or external rewards like gift cards, to the proper way to phrase and call out past activity within the weekly announcements.

Some members gave us glowing feedback!

One said “I’ve seen us try many connection platforms before and this is refreshing as they all end up as craigslist esque marketplaces for exchanging stuff. Love the user experience of Reciprocity and the focus on Offers as well as Asks.”

Another shared “I’m even more excited to be attending [this university] after seeing how helpful alumni are.”

Product Updates

• Shareable Posts — Each Ask/Offer now has a unique URL and an easily accessible “share” button. Members and admins can send links to posts to other community members.
• Community Announcements — Community managers can now post formatted announcements that get emailed to all members. Intended to be used as a “community newsletter”, with success stories, shoutouts of open Asks, and other content to drive engagement.
• Improved Member Account page — members can now see and manage all of their own posts and replies per community in one place.
• Fine-grained Notification control — members can control what activity triggers emails (on new match, reply, direct message, mention), and opt to get emails as a daily digest.
• Direct Messages — we redesigned the DM interface for a faster experience and rewrote it to use a scalable websocket implementation.
• Natural Language Processing — our interns, Will Dunlop and Thomas Lu, wrote a solution to more intelligently auto-tag Asks and Offers as members write them. We’re able to move beyond simple keyword matches to a more semantic understanding of content using a combination word vectorization and neural net approach. This work will also drive more intelligent matching soon.
• Show Common Tags — on your community dashboard, we now show the most common tags with live post counts. This helps members discover relevant posts in their community.
• Member Import — admins can now pre-populate member accounts with members’ name, bio, and more. When members sign up, they’re saved the hassle of manually re-entering this data.
• Member Search — now also searches member bios as well as name, title and organization.
• Improved formatting of posts — URLs are now automatically wrapped in links.

Backend Optimizations

• Now using mongodb Atlas Triggers to maintain live counts for post metadata at the member and community level.
• New websockets implementation that allows us to scale to multiple servers. With this, we were able to save costs by switching to multiple lower-tier servers on Heroku.
• Converted 90% of codebase to Typescript

Update on Previous Goals

• [Done] Add new “Open Asks” view for community admins
• [Done] Rewrite websockets implementation for better scalability
• [Done] Redesign member dashboard for easier access to member directory, tags and announcements
• [Done] Add newsletter authoring for community admins with tools to embed Asks and Offers
• [Deprioritized] Support uploadable user profile pictures
• [Rescheduled to Q3] Slack integration

Q3 Product Roadmap

• Integration with either Zoom or Calendly. (We’ve learned that the most common user flow is to schedule a call after getting a match and exchanging replies)
• First iteration of “recognition system” — adding badges for the most helpful members in a community.
• Improve matching. We’re still seeing too high a rate of false positives. We will build a feedback loop for admins to upvote/downvote each potential match, and this data will go into training our algorithms for better matches. Our AI interns will start work on this machine-learning-based matching system this summer.

Customer Development

We created a sales deck addressing many of the common questions our prospects were asking, so that one does not have to jump into the live demo in order to experience the product. It also includes a pricing table and competitor table that allow people to gauge us well.

We reached out to 648 entrepreneurship professors across the United States, off of our previous blast’s learning that MBA program directors weren’t the best initial contact as they did not always feel the pain of matching students with each other and alumni.

Several interesting opportunities have come out of this, from a future guest post on the Entrepreneurship and Innovation Exchange blog, contacts at the Blackstone Launchpad, and interest from top schools like NYU Stern.

Coronavirus Response

Our July deadline for offering Reciprocity free to coronavirus-affected communities has come and gone. That said, we have introduced a free tier for groups under 50 members in size for customers to trial the product. Simply get in touch to discuss.

Team

Will Dunlop (Stanford) and Thomas Lu (UC Berkeley) have completed their internships with us.

Our task for Thomas and Will was to help us improve tagging with AI. They developed a hybrid approach combining word vectorization (which is effective with smaller amounts of data) and machine learning (which helps the system improve as it gains more data).

We appreciate their dedication and innovation and look forward to continuing to work with them in the future!

Fundraising

We decided to halt our prior fundraising efforts to support a development shop this quarter.

The pandemic forced us to think in new lean and innovative ways. Amit doubled down on development research and found a way to eliminate $15–20K of projected development cost through use of newly released MongoDB Atlas features that allow much more efficient scaling.

We also reimagined team responsibilities so Amit could go full-time on product development, while Corey fields all other business responsibilities.

We’re lucky that our operation is lean enough that we can fund the company off of our consulting efforts and persevere through the market downturn.

Our Ask and Offer

Ask: Introduce us as always to administrators of online communities. Startup accelerators and entrepreneurship programs are the best fits we’ve found so far (portfolio directors and the like.)

Offer: Both Amit and Corey are already engaged in consulting around front-end development and marketing currently, but we’re happy to look over any projects you have in those subjects and offer what we can.

Happy helping!