MeetAtInbound.com

We are beta testing a networking solution build on top of Slack that makes Inbound 2016 even more kick-ass: it makes it easier to find and connect with the right people. It is built by the InboundLabs team and open to our connections. If you want to try it out but don't know us yet, you can get on a list at MeetAtInbound.com - if you want to understand more about what it is and how it works...read on!   Or just join MeetatInbound.com here.

About a year ago, we switched all of our customers from email to Slack. It was an eye opener. Since then, we changed our web chat to Drift.com and, most importantly, started experimenting with bots and new ways of collaborating online in our Lab.

MeetAtInbound.com is just one more of these experiment.

As I'm sure many of you have, I have attended hundreds of conferences and meetups over the past twenty years. I also had the privilege of organizing hundreds of activities for and together with Endeavor.org, First Tuesday, The Founder Institute, and Startup Weekend.

One request we consistently got was "more and better networking." The one thing I always miss at conferences happens to be the same. And it seems to be the hardest thing to do.

Slack has changed the way we work and it seems that people have already been using it for events and conferences. Slack even has its own recommendations for it. A perfect challenge for our lab.

Just a few days ago - with less than a week to go to Inbound 2016 - I asked myself five questions and wrote down some notes.

1. What do we want at a conference?

Apart from the obvious: the sessions, entertainments and after hours cocktails, which HubSpot has taken good care of all already, conferences are about connecting with people.

• Meet the people I have on my list and strengthen ties with them
• Discover contacts that might lead to business opportunities
• Have a good time with like-minded people

2. What can I do with Slack?

Slack is a tool for "team communication." I would consider all conference attendees a team. Or a team of teams. What does Slack solve out of the box?

• Avoid having to install yet another app on my cell. Slack is there already
• Start and maintain engaging one-on-one conversations
• Build ad-hoc groups conversations using channels

3. What can I not do with Slack?

Slack is usually used for in-house teams. So, where does it fall short?

• Finding people. The team directory sucks and in the free version there are limited profile fields
• Discovering new people. Clicking on profiles is cumbersome. When people join channels the status message is useless
• Accessing information. Creating Slack posts to maintain events information is just wrong. Especially when you have 283 sessions and 270 speakers

4. What can we implement, ideally without code, in a few hours?

In the past, our weapons of choice to customize and extend Slack have been Api.ai, Zapier.com, Airtable.com and some Node.js on Heroku. What could we puzzle together in a few hours?

• User registration. Slack does not offer a way for users to sign up natively. Instead, users have to be invited. There are several well-known hacks to help here and we solved this issue with form registration in Airtable and a Zap that triggers the invitation mail from Slack. It also allows us to send automated follow up emails with additional information
• User onboarding. One thing I hate about all Slack communities is that after I join, I feel like I'm in a room full of strangers and a maze of channels. I wanted to provide users with (a) clear instructions inside Slack and (b) point them to a few users (or at least one!) they already know. Airtable and Zapier did the job again. We just ran into a problem of overcoming Zapier delays of up to 15 min. We unfortunately ended up writing a small Slack app with 15 lines of code to solve this. :)
• Finding people. Using Airtables (in view only mode) kicks ass over the Slack "Team Directory." We built a first version, which allows to search, filter and sort, with zero effort
• Connecting people. Since this experiment works as invite-only, we were able to again use Airtable with Zapier to introduce new users to those that invited them in a dedicated #meet channel. Lots of room for improvement there but it will take some coding. Meanwhile we simply renamed the #general channel to #lobby and posted another slack message (using Airtable data and Zapier) with richer user profiles. As well as links to Airtable profiles.
• Session agenda. While the Inbound site does a good job, I am not really a fan of SmartEventCloud. It's great for searching and filtering, but it lacks the ability to ask simple questions: What are the current sessions? What are the next sessions? While not critical for our experiment I thought it would be a great way to test the new API.ai "card" features

As I finished writing this post, most of the features are already functional and passed testing. In total, just a few hours and less then twenty lines of code.

Interested in checking it out but got no invite yet?
Just get on the list at MeetAtInbound here.