Yesterday something occurred to me, worth a quick share right here. Vincent and I, together with the cyberdigma team came up with the first Seats2meet.com online dashboard about 5 years ago. A VERY static overview of faces and names, mainly because the location in Utrecht became SO busy, we wanted people to check in as a means of crowd control. We didn’t have anything for that, and came up with the dashboard.
Over the years, this has evolved into booking a workspace, the serendipity machine, seats2meet.com connect and now really the core of Seats2meet.com. It’s becoming clearer and clearer that meetingspaces are just a means to keep the eco-system up and running, and that the software where this eco-system meets and connects is the main driver of this economy, resulting in a need for meetingspaces, offices, events but also products and services that other S2M locations provide. And don’t forget the value of connecting to our mesh for large globals nowadays.
At the core of this should be great software. And that’s always been quite a challenge. In this eco-system, we always have great ideas. And to make things worse, one week later this idea has evolved and has gotten 5 brothers and sisters. Try keeping up with that when you’re trying to develop a stable software platform to support these ideas. It’s just impossible.
And i’ve noticed that. With all the software Seats2meet.com has built, it’s always been a work in progress, in permanent beta. While i was always happy to help bug testing and suggesting improvement, software that isn’t perfect is a hard sell. “Check in to connect to others” is a great sell, but if you can’t check in because of a bug, you’ve lost the potential fan/guest.
Yesterday i was working in Utrecht, and checked out our Amsterdam connect page to see how things were down there. In a matter of 10 minutes i had answered 3 questions from 3 different locations, and invited 2 people to meet at another point in time. I even ran into an old school friend in there, who was working in Amsterdam. So basically, it took me 10 minutes to plant the seeds and strengthen or grow the ecosystem, what would have taken me 1 hour -at least- without this platform. Even more, i would’ve probably missed those opportunities because some questions came from different cities or countries.
The value of those 10 minutes is undoubtedly very high. Almost always a connection is made, making people love Seats2meet.com, returning the favour sometime later by recommending us or booking an eventspace, etc.
The main insight for yesterday was this: Finally, Vincent and the cyberdigma team have found a way to build robust and stable software in an environment that highly volatile. Congratulations, it’s now time for all operators to get as many people as active as possible, and show the world what Seats2meet.com was build for!
