When the room is the app

August 1, 2026 · Matt Connors

Our first event hit the cold-start problem: there were never quite enough people active on the app at the same moment for matchmaking to surface anything.

This isn’t that surprising. They were at an event. Their attention was on the panel, or on the person in front of them - which is exactly where it should be. Asking someone to stop, pull out their phone, and build a profile in the middle of a networking event is asking them to be a little bit rude to the room.

But that’s exactly where the people are. Tend2Thrive is a networking app - it’s worth nothing without other people on it, and the cheapest density I’ll ever find is a room already full of them. So the moment I most need someone to sign up is the moment they can least afford to look down.

That’s the bind, and my answer was to move the work off the event entirely: networking that opens before it starts, ephemeral accounts so you can join without signing up, chat so a connection has somewhere to go afterwards. During the event itself Tend2Thrive should be an augmentation - it should help, not hurt. Show the value beforehand, and the app only has to do the light thing while you’re there.

So we decided to stop competing with the room, and become the room instead.

Our first virtual networking event

We treated it just like a real event - at a scheduled time, for a scheduled duration. But instead of a large Zoom call, we simply had a gallery: folks could browse each other’s avatars, names, and headlines, then privately indicate whether they were interested in meeting. If both sides agreed, a chat would open.

A deliberately small group, with some promising numbers:

Eight people is a small room. But three quarters of it found someone worth meeting, five of those became real connections, and at an average of thirty-odd messages apiece these weren’t superficial exchanges.

Promising, and humbling, because it means my initial direction was off. Six weeks of building my way around a competition for attention, and what finally won it was removing the thing I was competing with. I’d treated the physical room as a given and the app as whatever had to fit around it - the same mistake I made when I decided nobody wanted another chat app.

I could have found this out in an afternoon - open a Zoom, put eight people in it, introduce them by hand. But I don’t think I’d have had the idea before I had the pieces. A virtual happy hour is chat, plus presence, plus a card people can read before they’ve met, plus mutual matching - it’s just what fell out when I set those next to each other. Cheap validation is good at testing a hypothesis and bad at producing one.

What’s next

You may notice you can’t sign up on this site anymore. There’s a waitlist instead - and the waitlist resolves into a networking event.

That’s the same move as everything above. Signing up on your own drops you into an empty app, which is the cold-start problem in miniature: one person, no room. Arriving as a group means there are people there the moment you show up. So the queue isn’t really a queue - it’s the guest list.

If that sounds like a good evening, join the waitlist.

We’ll keep running physical events too. I still think there’s real value in browsing who’s in a room and gauging mutual interest up front, rather than leaving it to the luck of who you happen to stand next to.