Hello, world!

July 5, 2026 · Matt Connors

I started Tend2Thrive 3 weeks ago with the goal of making networking easier for everybody. It came from a problem of my own: I could never remember where I’d met someone, or when we’d last spoken. That history is inherently multi-medium - sometimes it’s a coffee, sometimes it’s a zoom call, sometimes it’s an event. Stitching this together from the incumbent players was difficult, as most are in a war to prevent scraping and maintain their stranglehold on user-generated content.

In contrast, I decided to be aggressively user-friendly - giving full control of data, and building capabilities through compatibility, rather than control. Users are the producers, and I believe they’ll go where they are treated best. It’s obvious to me that they deserve autonomy over their data, and visibility into how it is used.

AI - despite its flaws - is incredibly empowering to the end user. It’s now simple for anybody to build their own professional website. But getting that site in front of the right people is still hard. Features are practically commoditized, so a durable moat is hard to find - but interoperability, plus a real record of who actually met whom in person, sure feels like one to me.

Product Progress

Week 1: formation

• Formed the company.
• Initial value proposition: A way to remember where you met someone, so you can follow up and grow your professional network.
• Deployed the tend2thrive.com marketing site with a “waitlist” boundary to the app itself.
• The garden motif was there from the beginning, and I had some fun with the logo.

Week 2: the app

• A real timeline - a stem growing out of a pot, one node per person you meet.
• Scan-to-remember: show your code like a digital lanyard; one scan logs who and where.
• Can add events to your timeline.
• Per-field privacy (Nobody / Contacts / Connections) on all profile data, as well as the right to be forgotten via a self serve, full account deletion.
• Connections you earn — mutual and verified, not a follower count.
• API keys, so your AI agent can work on your behalf.

Week 3: expanding functionality, hosting events

• Cleaned up the “contacts” capabilities, and differentiated between data you have entered for someone, versus the data from their own profile.
• Bring your own links: email, LinkedIn, GitHub, X.
• Branded emails, sanitized profile images.
• Event host tools: magic links to prebuilt profiles, live matchmaking capabilities.

This week’s challenge

I connected with Nick from SignalFit during week 2, and we decided to co-host an event together to showcase SignalFit’s matchmaking capability alongside Tend2Thrive’s app.

The event was great, but we hit the cold start problem - while conversion was decent, there were never enough people active on the app at the same time to surface live matchmaking suggestions.

This week, we’ll be looking at delivering value before the event starts, so it is clear why users should also use Tend2Thrive during the event.

Stay tuned for the next event we host!