One month into Beta. Time to share what we’ve built, what we’ve learned, and what’s ahead.
TL;DR: One month of Beta: match reasons, better talking points, in-app support, secondary emails, and a peek at what’s coming next.
We announced our Beta launch on the 28th of October. Now that it’s just over a month, it felt both significant for our community and for ourselves to share back what we’ve learned, the features we introduced and others we have planned as a result. Flynt’s success is in many ways a double edged sword, scaling a product that now has both hundreds of users and is international by default.
Giving people rich context on why we’re saying they should meet someone has always been part of our vision. Like with everything we do we’ve needed to feel really confident that we can do so really well. Now that we know we can, it’s available to our members for every one of their matches.
You may be wondering how it works. It’s really simple to explain, but not simple technically. In short, each person’s profile is turned into data that can be used by our model, otherwise known as an embedding. Our model makes the highest quality match it can based on a few criteria we’ve learned work well. We use the data version of a person’s profiles, the data on their match and use a large language model (something like Chat GPT) to generate the reasons the match is great.
Though we’ve noticed (and have been surprised by it) that making great matches means people don’t tend to need ways to get the chats going — we still think it’s the right call to have them there before people meet for the first time.
It works in the same way we generate reasons for matching. I personally find them helpful, not during the call, but in the prep for it.
From being able to message someone if you’re running late or need to reschedule to needing to cancel entirely and having that handled by Flynt.
At one point we were doing most of this ourselves. Messaging people directly on other platforms to try and help them reschedule with their match or giving someone a heads up if someone couldn’t make it anymore. It became a bit too much work and didn’t feel like the best use of founder time, but we learned loads about the right features and product we needed to build.
Flynt meetings happen on Fridays and during working hours. People usually take their meetings around lunch time or in the afternoon. For some people it can mean their meeting ends up sandwiched between other work meetings.
We heard from some users that they’d really value being able to also connect their work calendar so they don’t forget their meeting. Now they can!
For me this has two sides to it, one is member facing so that you can have context on who you’re being matched with and what their company does. The other is for us as founders to learn more from our users and make sure we retain high context on our community members.
At some point, this could scale into pages maintained by the companies themselves. There could be a world in which that’s important enough for all of the best companies who care about their employer brand.
Post match feedback is an important part of how we continue to learn what’s working for you and needs to be better about matching. There were some instances in which people had a match, didn’t submit feedback for their match yet, but had already been onto their next match, which meant they missed a really important part of the experience.
We’ve been calling the Flynt matching system, FRED (yes, after Fred Flintstone) and have reverse engineered something along the lines of Flynt Recommendation Engine Designation. Which simply means that everything about you, the feedback you give, the feedback your matches give all forms an increasingly informed opinion on what might be best for you. One area I find fascinating is that a great match is a moving target. What might’ve felt like a great match for you two years ago from a pure career stand-point, may not be the perfect match today. Our ambition is that FRED can keep up with your changing and evolving needs.
We wanted customer support to also feel special on Flynt. When you start a conversation with support a few things happen, a ticket is created in the admin panel, both admins and the user are notified of the support ticket, the admin can then start a conversation directly on Flynt and people can respond in messages.
I’m particularly proud of this because of the vision we have for how it should feel to meet new people. Every step of the way should feel premium, even when you need help. The best way for us to guarantee that is to keep it in our system. Importantly, right now, it’s a great source of user feedback and it gives us the ability to respond super quickly to annoying pain points.
Now that we have more context of the type of data we need to make a great match, we’ve been making the end to end experience even better. Both for our users and our ability to match them with the right person.
For example, we need to be able to know if you're on a management track or an individual contributor track. You can be very senior and a bit more junior in both. Importantly, the types of discussions you may want to have could be specific to your shape of role, management or individual contributor.
We’ve also improved the range of options on the types of industries you can select and simplified the company size options to be less startupy. For example before we’d ask you which size of company you’re in by the series of fundraising round. It doesn’t work as well at scale and most people told us they didn’t know which round their company was in.
We have a bunch of ideas of new and exciting features, though, we’re focusing on the ones we know add the most immediate value to our community. One of the ones I’m most excited by, is better time zone aware meeting availability setting and same country matching. I’ve been surprised by the fact we have people in different countries already. Both people who are primarily UK based but travel a lot and people who recently moved or come to the UK often. Both are great use cases for Flynt and great reasons to meet new people. We want to lean into that. Another one is communities and forums. Both as a way to get to know groups of people who care about specific topics on Flynt and another separate version where people can see which features and improvements others are requesting and be able to upvote.
It’s been a joy to build Flynt for ourselves and our very eager and engaged community members. Sometimes the conversation between our members feels real time, there have been many days where we heard the feedback and a few hours later shipped a feature.
Flynt is growing and improving very quickly. Come and see what we’re up to, meet our great community members and help us create a networking experience unlike anything you’ve experienced before. If you’re a member, keep the feedback coming, we’re listening.
Heldiney Pereira – Co-founder & CEO
I'm building Flynt because I believe in a human-centred approach to making professional connections. Our technology is designed to make people feel more connected, less isolated on their career journey and inspired by all the great people they meet.
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