A few years ago, the Random Coffee initiative became popular in the IT industry (sometimes together, sometimes with a hashtag). The bottom line is that people from different teams, departments and companies are randomly scheduled to have meetings over a cup of coffee - just talk about anything. This helps to get out of your “bubble” when you forget that outside the narrow circle of colleagues and friends there really is a whole world full of different people.
And in IT, there has long been its own unspoken “Rule 34” - if an idea exists, then it has long been formalized into a product and a startup is already developing. Konstantin Shubin and Pavel Kozlov worked together at Yandex, saw a similar initiative there, took the idea into service and decided to make an independent business out of it.
Random-coffee.ru in numbers: 5,000 interesting interlocutors from more than 30 communities, almost 15,000 meetings held.
The idea is to go beyond the professional bubble.
“I had two problems - I didn’t have enough communication with new people, and after working for two years in the Yandex.Health project, I realized that I want to do something different,” says Konstantin.
“We thought that this might be interesting not only to people inside Yandex. At one point, your colleagues become friends, dine together, relax together, close in their circle, and communication outside Yandex disappears altogether, ”says Pavel. He decided to test the hypothesis and talked about the idea on his Facebook page. He doubted that strangers would want to meet in person, having no connections between themselves, so he made the post closed - only for friends. “I expected 10-12 people to join. But the closed post immediately gathered 100 participants. Then we believed in this idea. "
At the beginning, it was a bot that asked if a person wanted to participate in meetings. The answers fell into the Excel spreadsheet. Paul saw a list of all comers and himself, with his hands, broke them into pairs. He took the whole list, divided in half and combined in the order of how people responded.
“There were people who wrote and said:“ Look, there is such a girl there, I would love to get to Random Coffee with her, here’s a link to her profile, you can somehow go there ... ”, says Pavel,“ to which I replied: “you have two hands, you have a link to her profile, write to her, it’s very simple, what you still lack”. Such things have never rolled. The concept of Random Coffee is casual encounters. If you know who you want to meet, you can write to the person yourself. ”
The idea of Random Coffee really sounds too simple to believe that people need such a product. Now there are times when everything is connected with everyone, almost any person from you in a pair of buttons. Why a service that makes appointments with people if you yourself can write to anyone? However, the idea is in demand.
“We all have a barrier that prevents us from writing to a stranger,” Konstantin says. “We all think that they will most likely refuse, this is an unpleasant feeling. If you wrote to someone and called for coffee, they expect from you that you want to get something from the meeting. You are not in an equal situation - you are as if asking. At a meeting in the Random Coffee format, you are completely equal. The bot removes all the awkwardness. ”
Pavel Kozlov and Konstantin Shubin
The product is very simple technically
“Somewhere at the third iteration, a development colleague approached me and ironically said:“ you probably distribute with your hands ”. Damn, of course with your hands, what remains. He says: “Let me write you a simple script that will randomly split pairs.” No sooner said than done, ”says Pavel.
The product moved away from manually sorting the plates, but the truly complex things did not appear in it. A bot for a messenger with a set of scripts and texts. A backend, which matches people according to certain parameters, sends a pair and saves the history of matches, so as not to be repeated. Front with a list of participants, newsletters, meeting analytics - how many appointments are scheduled, how many people actually met, how the participants rated the meeting.
“We started working on Facebook, so we made a bot for their messenger. We used ManyChat, at that time it also only supported the Facebook messenger tool. Plus, there is a convenient visual designer to create stories and write scripts did not need to attract a developer. Although he was with us and helped, many of the experiments turned out to be carried out very quickly. Until now, we easily collect some things through ManyChat and launch them to the audience, ”says Konstantin.
The main difficulty of the project is not technical - it is difficult to gather a community around you and find ways to monetize
Pavel and Konstantin started with the B2B path and began to offer Random Coffee to companies as a service. Their first customer was the GoPractice community. “GoPractice was our first test. It was interesting for us to look at the numbers in the held community, so we worked with them for free and continue to this day. With other communities, we have already gone through a commercial partnership scheme and offered monthly payments, ”says Konstantin.
After the first post about Random Coffee in the community about three hundred people came to participate in the distribution of pairs. Following began the word of mouth. Community organizers themselves went to the guys and asked on what conditions it is possible to start the service at home.
“For me it was the first experience selling a product outside the company. We understood that the more participants, the more support work, so we made the lowest rate up to one hundred participants and decided to take five thousand rubles a month for this. I was very worried, it seemed to me that it was a lot of money, and hardly anyone would agree immediately. But we made an offer, and everything seemed ok. There is always a fear to name the amount and get rejected, so at the start it is very important not to be afraid. Subsequently, I even specifically overestimated the price tag, again worried - now they definitely will not agree. But again there was success, then again and again. ”
In the beginning, do not rush to grow a team and strive for investment
The guys say that the project is already making a profit, but so far it is not enough to support a full-fledged team. At full time, only Konstantin is involved in the project. Pavel is engaged in business development and the search for new contacts, combining this with the main work in Yandex. The technical director Ramil Galimov also works the same way. The rest of the team - support, moderators, editor and analyst - are connected as needed.
“When you are few, you can start something very quickly, compare, discuss, understand how to move on, take a new experiment,” says Pavel, “As soon as you get money and hire a team, you need a separate manager. Braking of work begins due to the fact that you must first broadcast everything so that everyone agrees, understands what to do. One developer can do the task in a day, and together they will do it in two days. While we are so ironic, although we precisely understand the value of a large team of professionals. We have experience in large companies and with large teams, and we know how huge this powerful machine is. But you need to be able to deploy it. ”
The guys also do not yet see the need for investments. They have already received several offers, but so far they have been refused. “I think the hope for investment is when the guys got together and decided to quickly cut money. We perceive investments as a tool, we do not want to take too early and do not know what to do with them. When we understand that we have reached the point where much more effort and people need to be applied, then we will take investments. ”
A startup can be valuable even if anyone can implement it.
The very concept of Random Coffee does not belong to any one, and the technical solutions are elementary. Therefore, having learned about the idea, anyone can implement it. Pavel and Konstantin faced this. After the launch in the GoPractice community, not only customers came to them, but also teams that, having learned more about the idea, began to develop it on their own.
“There are actually several Random Coffee-like products on the market. Most are launched only for companies, access requires a corporate email, ”says Konstantin. “They provide a technical solution, a tool for HR and work only for employees. There is a portal called Random Coffee - this is a Parisian startup, they make a technical solution purely for companies. Our approach is initially different, we want to give people the opportunity to communicate not only within the company. Most want to see how others are doing, what people still do. ”
The guys decided to go beyond corporate services and closed communities so that anyone could use the service. Many people want to go beyond their sphere, to see how people of other professions live. Therefore, they began to select an interesting community for everyone who wants to meet random people. For this, the guys came up with a bot that collects information about you for matching. You fill out a questionnaire, tell the bot about your personal goals, your sphere and interests. Then this data is reviewed by the moderator and recommends you to a certain community - to designers, entrepreneurs and so on. For that service, the guys charge a person a one-time fee.
“In order to choose the right community, you need to analyze the person’s profile well, so this part is done manually,” says Pavel, “We analyze the answers and the profile on Facebook, sometimes we look at mutual friends to understand how much he is in this or that hangout. Combining these three things, we select the right community for him. If we see a request, but there are no communities under it yet, we put it on the waiting list. ”
Meeting Paul and Miles at Random Coffee
Offline communication is a new sincerity
Recently, discussing the future of technology in an interview, the former chief editor of Wired UK said, “We forget one thing - sometimes it's just interesting to just talk to people.” There is no call for retrogradation. It’s rather interesting how the modern world offers digital tools for everything, even for offline communication, and how to reinvent the simplest forgotten things, like ordinary coffee meetings with real people. Konstantin and Pavel see their purpose in recalling this.
“When you left school or university, where you had lively communication, a lot of new social contacts of new, new interests, you had constant reasons to meet new people. Once you get to work, you cut yourself off a bit from the world - once, you need to work and the team almost does not change for many years in a row. Three years later, you get your first bells, the same environment around, nothing changes and you want something new, but you close up because there are no easy channels to find the right people with the same interests. You try different tools, group meetings, meetings, corporate parties, but they are not sharpened on this.
You come to the conference, and from the stage they talk about three-fold growth, about + 600% of something, a very, very “success story”. ” On the sidelines you also communicate and have to keep a brand name, “I’m still from this company, now I have a badge hanging on it.” There is a certain level that you must maintain in the conversation, to fulfill some obligations.
We just want to solve this problem so that you can get out of a closed environment and choose a party in which it will be comfortable and interesting. You meet a person at Random Coffee, there is no atmosphere of successful success that happens at conferences, you sit down and just discuss any things clean.
There is already a formulated trend - a request for offline. Previously, you could just go up and say, “hello, let's be friends”. 20 years have passed, and somewhere this thing disappeared. I can chat as much as I want in groups about products or about design or something else, but go offline and discuss face to face - this is a completely different level of communication.
This is a new sincerity. You again understand what it means to communicate offline, you understand the reaction of the person who sits in front of you, you see what is interesting to him. These are very basic human things that for some reason we began to forget. ”
Website Random Coffee random-coffee.ru