Show HN: Match.com meets LinkedIn for Professional Networking

2 points by teamlaft 13 years ago | 1 comment

Hi guys,

I'm a longtime lurker but not often enough commenter. I'm the co-founder of OpenDoor Meetings (www.opendoormeetings.com), which just launched and facilitates in-person introductions between business professionals with common interests and similar professional goals. You can think of us as Match.com meets LinkedIn.

We're an NYC based company focused on helping make in-person networking easier and more efficient to do. We make it simple to search and find relevant people in your field who have an "open door" policy to network with, and then through the site you can schedule time for a coffee or drink with them.

We fill the void left by LinkedIn which is great once you've met someone -- but how can you find relevant people to meet that you don't already know?

We're focused on three verticals to start with: financial services, law, and real estate. During our beta we signed up members from firms such as Goldman, Morgan, BlackRock, Deloitte, Weil Gotsal, Davis Polk, and more.

It'd be great to get any feedback on our site. If anyone is interested in testing it out, shoot me a note to jon@opendoormeetings.com and I'll get you immediate access after you sign up for an invite code. For our launch, we're focusing just on NYC, but then plan to expand to other cities.

Thanks for your time and feedback!

sebg 13 years ago |

Hi - I find this interesting as I use LinkedIn quite a bit and am frequently reaching out to people to grab coffee with them. I tried the hedge fund search as I imagine that would be a highly sought after search and while it lists the names, it doesn't tell me any information about the people. It's a tough to know how much information to share to entice me to sign up for your service. In my opinion, my curiosity wasn't enough to get my to sign up to see the people's profiles in the hedge fund search. Perhaps give me the ability to see one a day? Or perhaps let people specify that they are okay having their information shown?

As a general tip - as you are on hacker news, I would imagine that most people who would be interested in this are startup folks or people related to startup folks. So for this to be more interesting to them, it would make sense to start with the programmers at startups or growth hackers at startups or [fill in the blank] at startups. Then you'll be reaching the right people with the right message.

Good luck!