As we begin to acclimate to the post-pandemic world, it is increasingly apparent that forming social connections is harder than ever. From our extensive conversations with students and full-time employees alike, it is abundantly clear that most of our social needs, especially within the institutions we belong to (i.e. University and/or workplace), are not being met. Talking to decision-makers in institutions, like managers of large companies, reveals that they, too, do not feel like workplace social connections are being made, and productivity has suffered as a result. The problem is clear: both users and institutions alike need easier ways for their students/employees to meet and bond together. Tandem helps people form new, spontaneous connections with other people with common hobbies and interests, both inside and outside of their institutions. We do this by allowing two key features. One, we form interest groups around common hobbies and interests, and schedule pre-determined activities at set periods to encourage people to hangout together. Two, we flip the script of traditional social media, and instead of forcing people to reach out to others and see if they are free, we allow our users to signal that they are free by pressing a button on their app; we design a host of tools to help people who are simultaneously free find a way to meet and get to know each other.
In its current manifestation our application is a B2B service that institutions can plug-and-play to help facilitate the development of social circles within their strata. In using our service, our customers will see increased employee or student retention, higher happiness in school or the workplace, and an overall increased in productivity, all of which are positive indicators for long-term success. The users of the app themselves, too, will be able to fill the social quota that they hitherto might not have had access to, and form new, spontaneous connections that turns acquaintances into friends.
We’ve been working closely with K, a managing director of a local hotel chain in Thailand. Through our interviews, we learned that productivity in the back-office (measured as the number of stories finished in a sprint) has gone down significantly after the pandemic shutdowns led to permanent work-from-home. She hypothesizes that one reason for this is the lack of human connections between fellow employees, which results in work feeling more like a checklist than a common overarching goal to pursue. We intend to pilot our application with K’s company. We aim to revitalize the workplace connections that were once much more plentiful, and we’ll know we have succeeded if the number of stories finished each sprint sees a quantifiable uptick to pre-pandemic numbers.
There’s a few areas of uncertainty we are keeping in mind as we continue to develop our application. Firstly, we need to ensure that institutions are willing to pay for services. We’ve been working closely with a few select institutions to feel out whether the opportunity exists at all, and we’ve seen favorable early reports, but since our business model hinges entirely on institutional buy-in, this is something we need to explore on a deeper level. Secondly, we need to ensure that our approach results in consistent users buy-in. We need to ensure that users are happy and willing to press the signal button when they’re free, and that the spontaneous, interest groups-led approach leads to consistent meetups and hangouts. Our exploratory research has been positive on this matter as well, but more care has to be done to explore this dynamic across other age groups and demographics before we can conclusively say anything. Lastly, we need to ensure that, were we to become successful, we can become entrenched and build a ‘moat’ around our services that makes it harder for others to replicate. In its purest form there is nothing technically challenging about the service we aim to provide, and it’s something that other social media applications can easily replicate, were they to see value in doing so, and as a result we need to ensure that we have ways to become sufficiently entrenched in the industry very quickly, so that we are not involuntarily forced out in due time. Some key ways to do this would be to build widespread userbase familiarity, as well as develop exclusive contracts with key institutions.
Nevertheless, since the financial success of our endeavors hangs almost entirely on successfully getting institutional buy-in, the key leading signals we’re looking for (and conversely, the key antisignal we’re watching out for) is the number of institutions who see value in the service we’re providing. After we’ve been operational for a while, we’ll also want to pay close attention to overall user engagement statistics on our application, to ensure that we’re actually delivering on what we promised to begin with.
Broadly speaking, our research, both primary and secondary, reveals two key factors that make our app work. One, there is a correlation, or at the very least a perception of correlation, between overall workplace happiness/social connectivity and employee productivity. As a result of this correlation, it is much easier to get institutional buy-in for a seemingly auxiliary service such as ours. Second, the social media model of current incumbents are inefficient at their core. Not only does a misalignment of incentives between the users and developers of the app lead to perverse incentives and a focus on developing unhealthy addictions, research has also shown that these apps are simply not very good at their purported purpose: to allow users to get to know and hang out with other people. We are confident that our app will be successful in tackling both of these factors.
There were 2 key options we considered when designing our application. First, we had to decide whether we wanted to develop a B2C or B2B product. We discovered through our user testing and interviews that the B2C product likely has a much better upside in terms of scale, but getting there is going to be monumentally difficult, especially when we are competing with apps with billions upon billions of MAUs already. We see potential in the B2B approach as there is a dearth of other plays in the field, and we are able to fill a niche very perfectly here. Secondly, we had to decide if we wanted our application to be a ‘mainline’ social media, or a supplemental product to other connectivity apps. Again, we also realized that there is a much higher upside if we are able to successfully convert Tandem into a mainline application, but it did not seem worth it on a risk-adjusted basis. Instead, we are focusing on our small niche within the enterprise connectivity app, and we fully intend for our users to use it along other personal and enterprise apps, such as Facebook, Slack, and so on.
Now is the perfect time to tackle this issue. The pandemic beginning to wane in its long-term impact means that companies are looking to rebuild and redevelop the workplace to what it was pre-pandemic, and we need to swoop in as these sweeping institutional policies are being implemented. The longer we wait, the less chance we have of being able to meaningfully impact these changes.
