A
few months ago, after we had a couple articles in The New York Times
and Wired we were contacted by a handful of venture capital firms who
were interested in talking with us about investing in Imzy. At the
time, we weren't thinking about raising money, but you never turn down a
conversation like that. So, I went to San Francisco and took 5
meetings with different firms. The most exciting meeting was with
Index Ventures. They were
really
excited about the problem we were working on and more excited about
what we are planning on doing in the coming years. I met with them for
about 30 minutes and we were both ready to continue conversations. The
following week they flew to Salt Lake City to see our office and meet
our staff. Included in this meeting was my first official presentation
to them on what we are doing, what we had proved in the private beta so
far, and where we were going.
It was nerve wracking.
@Kaela
and I worked basically around the clock creating a presentation, and
I'm writing here because I wanted to highlight the importance one of our
communities
/lets_grab_coffee played in this process.
I wanted to show you guys what I presented them and express my thanks to
/lets_grab_coffee for being a model community.
Thank you, for being you. Imzy loves you.
Now, before I drop a few slides in here I want to set them up. In the
presentation, leading up to these slides, I talk a lot about the vision
for Imzy. It is a single place for all of your communities. This
means that if we get it right, when people participate successfully in a
community, they are inspired to find
and create more
communitities. This viral nature is crucial to our success. Also, we
talk a ton about the evolution of communities and the different phases
communities go through. We say that there comes a time in a community's
evolution where they can no longer do everything they need to do on the
platform they started on, so they start fracturing and doing things on
different sites
(this is where the importance of our upcoming developer platform comes in).
So, with those two concepts in mind, here are a couple of the slides I
used about Let's grab coffee. I want to not only illustrate that Let's
Grab Coffee is important, but illustrate what exactly
/lets_grab_coffee had done at this point in time (this was about 4 months ago).
First, I showed them this slide about the beginning and growth of
Let's Grab Coffee. You can see that the growth is pretty steady, this
is great! There is a large jump in interactions in the beginning June,
this was a change we made on how posts are overlayed with the feed. It
increased our participation about 3x across the board. Pretty cool!
Next (and this is the last slide I used about
/lets_grab_coffee), I showed how after the creation of
/lets_grab_coffee, 19 of the members of the community had gone on to create 20
other communities accounting for over 2 times the amount of users that
/lets_grab_coffee
had. This was a great sign, it spoke to the people understanding the
platform and working to grow new communities after being inspired by one
community.
What I didn't have a slide for, but spoke in depth about at this
point is something I was really excited about. About a month after
/lets_grab_coffee started, they decided they wanted to chat in real time
(which Imzy now supports but didn't at the time),
so they started a Discord channel. This Discord channel has become
more vibrant than their Imzy community. This may seem like a problem,
but really it proved my theory about how online communities evolve.
This was a great problem to have! Not only did they create a Discord
channel, they found a developer to build them a bot to play trivia in
the channel! This is exactly the pattern we expect to see when we
release the developer platform.
Some of you may be looking at these numbers and saying they aren't
impressive. I disagree, they may not be impressive for an entire
platform, but a
healthy community doesn't need to be a big community. Something small can lead to something big, and I think
/lets_grab_coffee helps to tell the story perfectly.
If you have any questions about our series A or anything I mentioned in this post, please ask. I'll answer anything I can!
I think from the above article, with a small group can membgasilkan the money so much,
