???? Camp Social

Bittersweet news, but we are winding down Serendipity in Software, the startup formerly known as Talk Social and Camp Social. Below, I’ll talk about what happened, what I learned, and what’s next:

I’m incredibly thankful to the investors, team, supporters, and everyone who took any time to try it out or lend a hand. At the end of the day, after a lot of spaghetti thrown against the wall, we never found anything that stuck. As I reached out to all our shareholders with the “sorry this didn’t work out” message, I received nothing but support for me and what we had tried. I owe Joe Greenstein for reframing it perfectly for me - it wasn’t a failure, it was a successful experiment!

I started exploring this space three years ago with the intent of finding some kind of mechanism to decrease loneliness in the world. After two major pivots and countless iterations on product, target audience, and business model, we just never found enough product/market fit to sustain the team or warrant further investment.

To that end, here’s a quick snapshot of what we had tried over the years.

Rally: Leverage online classes as a method of building human connection. We built a digital course platform that would occasionally drop you into a facilitated 1:1 conversation with another student to talk about the current topic.

What happened: Our v0 was cool, but our completion rates weren’t high enough to get enough density for 1:1 conversations. The UX was also confusing, and the initial topic may not have been the right one. But people LOVED the facilitated 1:1s, which is what led us to Talk Social.

Talk Social: Deeper conversation is critical for bonding amongst teams, communities, or even among friend groups. People normally struggle to have effective conversations where they can both feel safe and authentic and connect on a deeper level. Facilitators are really good at this, but can’t scale. We built a web-based video platform where a virtual facilitator would guide the conversation topics, based on a huge library of templates we had designed.

What happened: The actual experience of having software guide a group conversation, despite the clunkiness of early stage tech, was really cool. Everyone thought so. I personally had such richer conversations than normal. This being 2021, however - it was hard for remote teams & communities to adopt a new video tool. Even then - Zoom fatigue was real, and the idea of putting another video call on the calendar was unappealing, regardless of how much we crave social connection. We kept iterating on the market and the product, but never found enough motivation there. Which is what led us to Camp Social.

Camp Social: Again, for teams and communities, building that needed sense of belonging and trust happens through members knowing each other. Centrally organized activities usually appeal to the lowest common denominator. We built a platform that would allow anyone in a community to organize a social event (online or IRL) for their community, and get recognized (and eventually rewarded) for doing so.

What happened: Our Figma prototype garnered strong interest from communities, the resulting full platform was met with crickets. Everyone we spoke to “wanted” the product, but we never found a reliable path to actual implementation - and definitely not payment! It also didn’t help that the Web3 market evaporated, so building DAO infrastructure with embedded tokenomics and NFTs had increasingly few buyers.

Going into this, I knew I was looking for solutions to the biggest problems of our time, with the hope that we’d find a solid business to support and accelerate them. It’s a bummer we didn’t find it.

As I reflect back on that journey, there are several lessons learned, notably:

• Culture matters as much as mission, if not more. I was so focused on a world-changing mission, I had made the mistake of assuming that the culture would be taken care of.
• I could have been more focused on “who is going to pay for this?” instead of it’s cousin, “who needs this?”
• To build a moonshot (which this was!) one needs to quickly find product/market fit, or amass enough capital for a large number of at-bats. We had neither.
• Especially in the last year, I could feel my intuition telling me that this wasn’t working. But we had a built a full product already, so we kept slogging to see if we could find a market for it. I could have reduced burn even further, and squeezed out another pivot before cash ran out.

What’s next for me?

1. I made the decision to be CTO/technical co-founder vs CEO for my next main focus. More soon ??
2. If you care about cultivating connections for your business, career, and life - I still have Relatable , my relationship platform, going strong. ??
3. It’s (awkward) sister company, BeMoreRelatable , provides guidance and accountability for cultivating professional relationships. I have something exciting cooking, more soon! ??

Zero regrets.