1,700 users in the first 24 hours (Part 2)
Act Three: Unprepared— by design.
My cofounder and I found ourselves hours away from the largest event event we’ve ever hosted— projectXpresso. PX promised to pair up over 1,400 aspiring professionals with 700 existing professionals for 15 minute information interviews over vidchat. But with hours before it was supposed to start, we ran into a problem— all we had was an excel spreadsheet of 2100 names and a single page website. Without imagining that our little marketing experiment would go so well (to hear more about how we acquired 2,100 registrants in just under 36 hours, check out part one of this post), we very quickly realized that we were in for a long night ahead of us.
Thanks lean startup, now we’re screwed.
Act Three: Screw your fancy machines.
We found ourselves in a unique situation where we quickly realized that the best option was solving this problem by hand, not by leveraging oft fetishized machine-tinkering methodologies. After removing the 8 or so redditers who aspired to become Batman (we actually introduced them to each other— although we have no idea if they met up), we quickly realized that we were gaining insights no machine could tell us.
We were able to fill very both very specific requests (such as one student who wanted to meet with a systems engineer at a space company, and we had a systems engineer from NASA register) and more eccentric requests (such as a student who aspired to become a professional story teller with someone who was already living that dream). Aspiring game designers were paired with noteworthy professionals from Disney and EA, both of which we had multiple professionals donating their time. We scoured linkedin profiles of our users to make sure we knew what jobs people had and what jobs people wanted to learn about. We even emailed our users to ask them for clarifications— and they emailed us right back blown away at the level of detail we paid to them. Of course, there were some requests that totally missed, and the off ratio meant that not everyone could be paired, but in sum we were able to send to hand paired emails introducing nearly 1,400 people to each other.
The British Are Coming!
After spending over over 14 hours pouring through linkedin profiles and personal websites of our users to figure out what they really wanted, we realized that we had only paired people together in our excel spreadsheet— no one had received an email from us. But no fear, it was only 1am — plenty of time. But, then came the emails. Excited users from Europe started emailing us asking us if we had forgotten them— we had forgotten the 10 hour time differential! We entered panic mode— woke up some friends and began the tedious process of emailing each user personally with an introduction.
5am— only 50% done emailing every user by hand. It was time to give up our love of the manual process and bring out the scripting languages. After 20 minutes we were able to write a script that automatically emailed the rest of our users with introductions, but not without an apology for not doing it by hand!
Finding ourselves again exhausted, we quickly crashed with the satisfaction of knowing over 1,400 people had the opportunity to speak about the sort of professional work that interests them. The email introductions were simple, and we encouraged registrants to jump on Skype for the one-on-one conversations. Though we were left with two last qualms -- would people actually do this? and, if they do, will people really enjoy this experience?
Act Three: They like us. They really like us!
The results we received were as positive as the number of registrants suggested they might be. We woke up to dozens of emails of people thanking us personally for spending the time to help them. Furthermore, our users enjoyed talking to each other so much they went beyond our expectation and on average spoke for over 30-minutes with their mentees, with many conversations lasting over an hour. (These insights all came from a survey we sent out following the event, so there may be a selection bias). Most excitingly, 95% of the respondents said they were interested in participating again.
Here's your chance to join in on the fun: ProjectXpresso returns on February 1st. You can signup at www.ProjectXpresso.com