We are building the tool for everyone to seek out the introduction they need to solve their problems. We are a peer-to-peer network that thrives on a balance of give and take, that operates on the value of human introductions.

Seven months ago, we decided that making Volley was a worthwhile thing to do with our lives. The brevity of this thought makes it seem like it was an easy decision, but it wasn’t at all. We (myself and my co-founder Mike Murchison) both knew that embarking on building a social product on the web in 2014 would be an uphill battle and so far it absolutely has been. We had already made several trial products to test our hypotheses about the landscape of local communities and facilitating introductions before we made the first version of Volley (a simple address book, a questionnaire, a daily community email, etc…)

These efforts all proved one thing consistently: People love to meet each other when they have a reason to and when both parties are “vetted” by each other’s networks. We learned that you need a person to always be facilitating the introductions. Computers are just lousy and impersonal at that, but people are fantastic at it. We thought that if we could build a tool that scaled that behaviour we might have something worthwhile.

We saw incredible engagement on these early platforms and heard about all the wonderful connections we were creating for our early members. It was very motivating. So we built our V1, an open introductions platform centered around the question: “What are you looking for?”

If you were around for that then you’d know that we got some early traction on HackerNews and Reddit garnering us ~900 members by the time we shut it down. We learned a hard lesson with that version:

The quality of the content and the people in our community are the most important ingredient to building out Volley successfully.

We didn’t educate or choose any of our early members on our first release of Volley, so naturally the little community we had fostered in our first email tests were smothered by average internet users looking to play with the next cool thing. I don’t blame any of them; we made no effort to tell them how to use our product beyond placeholder text. Most of our very first users (~30 people) are still with us because that’s how early adopters are. They’re the ones who have supported us and given us awesome feedback the whole way through.

Amazingly, when we relaunched Volley 2 as an invite-only platform on ProductHunt a couple of months later, we got all of our old members back in a matter of three days, except this time we let them wait in a queue like Medium and Mailbox. Over six weeks we sifted through them one-by-one, carefully adding those who we were ready for and who we felt would contribute best to our little community. Today we’ve managed to grow that to 600 members strong without any loss in quality and we’re adding close to 100 a week, solely based on our members inviting their friends and us approving requests for invites from our landing page.

We also learned just how important it is to be clear about what it is you’re trying to accomplish with the members of a closed community.

Consider this essay our best way of communicating just that.

Volley, as you may know, is now an invite-only community. Mike, Danielle and I have special windows into the site where we painstakingly monitor every piece of content created as well as many automations on our back-end to sift out bad requests, bad members and bad replies. We’re adding to these rules every day and will be adding a page to be more transparent about these policies in the coming days.

This has proven to be hugely valuable to our members and our stats and feedback only confirm the feeling of comfort I have when I browse my own deck on Volley.

We’re building Volley because we truly believe that it is people who change the world, not products. Great products — tools, allow human beings to do something they ordinarily do, better. We are building the tool for everyone to seek out the introduction they need to solve their problems. We are a peer-to-peer network that thrives on a balance of give and take, that operates on the value of human introductions.

We’re building Volley because we truly believe that it is people who change the world, not products. Great products allow human beings to do something they ordinarily do, better.

People are fantastic at introducing one another. Yesterday I helped a friend meet a 3D printing expert here in Toronto and they’re already in talks of starting a service together. I introduced my cousin to a startup lawyer on Friday and they’re already drafting a founders agreement together. Last week I gave advice to a crowd of beginner front-end web developers because of a connection I made on Volley. I’m improving my life and the lives of others just by using a website for 15 minutes a day, by answering the requests of my contacts, and contacts’ contacts.

Every day we are facilitating these introductions and every day we experience the power of these connections being made between people. It is a fundamentally new internet behaviour that has never been capitalized on before and I think it’s something Mike and I can build. Mike has spent much of his life trying to facilitate introductions to help others and I have spent most of my own life trying to build insanely great products. We both care, at times, to a fault.

Right now, what we do want is for our visitors to understand that this is not another social network. Evan Williams of Obvious Corp. believes that the internet is a machine of convenience and I tend to agree. If you can help people do something they already do in real life, better & on the internet, then a successful product can probably be built.

But I also think that people mistake convenience for distraction.

I don’t want to be involved in building things that distract humans from the world that so desperately needs their focus. We are not creating a content = feedback loop that makes you feel good with every click. We definitely try to show our members that what they’re doing is valuable, but ultimately Volley takes effort to receive value and that’s how it’s meant to be.

It takes energy to craft a great request, but great requests get featured on Fridays. They get replies, they get volleyed and they ultimately end up in the hands of great people. This doesn’t mean you have to be creating requests every day, but you should give back when you don’t need something from others. That’s how this crazy universe seems to weed out the takers and Volley works the same way. Paying it forward is key to creating a better experience for yourself in the long term in life and on Volley.

It takes energy to craft a great request on Volley, but great requests get featured on Fridays, they get replies, they get volleyed and they ultimately end up in the hands of great people.

It’s easy for me to keep on talking about Volley, but it’s probably better if I just pipe down and let you request an invitation so you can see for yourself. If you’re reading this, you’re probably someone we want as a member. I’ll see your request for invitation immediately because all requests for invitations go to my phone on Slack and if I think we need you right now, I’ll be in touch. You can reach out to me on Twitter if you want to chat about any of this or just email me directly.

I can’t wait to see you on Volley and I really hope this essay has shown you how serious, committed and excited Mike, myself and Danielle are about building Volley into the best possible introduction machine possible.

All my very best on this beautiful fall day in Toronto, Canada

David Hariri, Co-founder of Volley