LinkYou – Your Professional Networking App – The Great Launch at TRH OH, Gurgaon

Matches are made in heaven and some great ideas take birth in coffee shops

Today, I am sharing with you the story of LinkYou, a professional networking app which was launched in beta phase at TheRodinhoods Open House, Gurgaon.
What is LinkYou ?

LinkYou is a professional networking app, which lets you explore great people & events around you. Based on your industry, interests and availability you can connect with people in your proximity or at event you are attending.

What problem is LinkYou solving?

Together, my partner and I, we both are like an idea vending machine!! We have planned, and planned; say 100+ ideas in different cafes every time we had been to one, without planning to, obviously. (What? Should I write a book about it? That’s great idea again. See, that’s how it works)

Whenever we tried to enterprise an idea, it required people, who can guide us; who can help us in technical aspects and connecting with more RIGHT persons, and their potential needed to make things rise from coffee-time gibberish.

If we need some tech guy, we usually post on facebook, linkedin, some job portal or ask some random friend who is ridiculously well networked, and knows everyone you know, like he can telepathically hack your friends’ list accessing your FB account. The only problem with that practice is that you end up taking too many favours with very less credibility.

With LinkYou, you can search people on basis of their skills, roles, industry and whatever it takes to filter out the best person for your work. 

Second major problem LinkYou solves is networking during events.

When you go to any conference or a professional event, you expect to hear great words but on the other hand you also expect to connect with people from your industry and get help from their experience; simply collaborate with them on some project you have in mind.

But finding that one person from the crowd of hundreds or thousands is extraordinarily improbable because there is now way you could specify your search from just assessing people from what they are saying, wearing or eating. Unless you have spy software powered Google Glasses. Although eating habits tell you a lot about a person.
At LinkYou, we collaborate with different events and give them a 6 digit code. This code can be shared with all the registrants using which they can join the event.

What’s next?  Attendees will have a list of all the fellow participants who are going to attend that event and have joined it on LinkYou. We believe in context of the event, its purpose and what the attendees seek, LinkYou becomes more personalised and relevant than FB, Twitter or LinkedIN.

Now even before you go to the event venue, you can find out the best person who you want to meet by applying our filters (industry, roles & more) and connect. We have an awesome Chat feature using which you can chat with people before you decide to meet. It is also an attempt to enable people draw more value from these events.

Once the event is over, you can get an archive of helpful documents, videos and much more information related to the event.
For Event Organizers:

1. List your event at LinkYou

2. Send 6 digits code to all registrants and ask them to Join the event

3. You can communicate with your event attendees by sending them message, providing them updates to event and sharing important links with them.

4. Get live feedback from the crowd and improve anything on spot.

5. Provide your participants with an archive of content once the event is over and keep the same for promoting your event next time.

As it’s a very early development phase of app, we are still improving it, we require your inputs on how can we improve it and how can it be more helpful to people.

Our future plans

–       We will be launching the first version of the app on Google Play Store in the first week of       October and on App Store in the month of November.

–       Our focus will be only on India for first 3 months and then we will also target the other markets.

We are looking for –

–       An android developer

–       A mentor who can guide us on the product and its expansion strategy

–       Feedback and Your suggestions to make  “LinkYou” better 🙂
Our experience at TROH

Once LinkYou’s prototype was developed and we had the same in our mobile devices, a big question we had in mind was how to get genuine user feedback and how to launch it?

TRH OH was the answer that came to our mind :).  We have been following TheRodinhoods from a long time and have heard a lot about great people who gather at TRH OH to witness some great ideas in their initial stage as well as when they are a trend in industry.

So, in our minds we were sure that we will be launching at TRH OH but there was just one problem; We did not know when TRH OH will take place and do we have to wait for the launch? But something happened on 24th July, which was certainly nothing short of Serendipity. A Rodinhoods newsletter landed in to my mailbox, which, to our happy disbelief, mentioned that the “The Next TRH Delhi Open House” has been announced and there is one slot available for a Launch. You know you are heading on the right path, when opportunity starts meeting your preparations, and you begin to feel lucky for the first time in your life.

So, the beta launch which we were planning to do in first week of September, It has to be done somehow on 22nd of August at TROH. I replied back to Asha Ji that this is the concept we are working upon and we would like to launch at TRH OH. We were asked to mail our presentation. for the same and 10 days before the event, we received a mail from Asha Ji saying that we have been selected for the launch. It felt like we are unstoppable now.

After another few days of our efforts, we reached at Stirring Minds, the great venue selected for Open House and we were psyched to see packed up venue.

From that point we knew that it was now our turn to be on stage and present not just our app, but our belief, talent and experience. We started our presentation, and to much of our surprise, Alok was standing there with us – as if he was also the part of our team. Dream like eh? It was a great gesture by him, as he participated equally in our presentation by answering the questions, by explaining our concept with some real life examples.

And as soon as the presentation started, we got that “Kick” we were looking for from the Rodinhood community. Especially, that one moment when Alok said, “I have been travelling across the world attending different events and I have not come across any such app till now which not only enhances your experience of networking at events but also does a lot more than that.”

A part of me jumped in the air, and raised my hands in the air. Nobody saw it because I did it very quietly, and in my head.

We even received some amazing feedback and suggestions over twitter as well.

It was an awesome experience for our team to become a part of Rodinhooders Community and we will Keep Thinking, Keep Doing. MORE!

Here is our ppt we used at TROH –