Shapr’s leaders would be the first to point out that for their app to succeed, they need to change human behavior.
Do you want to do business together?’” says Jain. “You don’t typically walk up to people on the street and say, ‘Hey, tell me about your job. But for professional networking, the bar was a little higher. With dating, users are open to meeting different types of people-there’s less concern about common contacts, or socioeconomic status, or job history, as long as the person is attractive. But according to Ankur Jain, Humin’s co-founder, the research wasn’t promising. Once the Humin team joined Tinder, it explored applying the swipe to acquiring friends and business associates. The next year it acquired Humin, a startup that organizes your contacts according to relationship-a sign, some predicted, that the company was thinking about brokering relationships of the non-romantic variety. In 2015 it partnered with Forbes to create a networking app for recipients of the magazine’s 30 under 30 award. Yet as Tinder has matured as a dating site over the last few years, the company has tried to expand into other forms of networking in an effort to spur growth. What action mimics the feeling of standing, sweaty and panicked, next to a half-eaten cheese plate? Is that something we really want to replicate? It’s harder to imagine the interaction that could create the digital experience of networking.
It was casual and instinctive, sort of like dating. The finger flick mirrored the unconscious motivations that cause people to hit on one another in bars. When Tinder launched in 2012, its main innovation was a motion: The swipe. Since it quietly re-launched in the fall of 2016, Shapr has grown to a network of 600,000, with 2,500 swipe-happy professionals joining each day, according to the company. Like Tinder, its users swipe right or left to signal the matches they’re interested in meeting. Every day Shapr pairs each of its users with 15 new connections, selected via algorithm through matching interests or career success. So he went back to the drawing board and came up with an idea that modeled his first success: the dating app. “It was a complete failure,” says Huraux.
It launched in 2014 as a thinly-disguised version of LinkedIn, allowing users to add second-tier contacts-friends of friends-to their business circles. The brainchild of Ludovic Huraux, a French entrepreneur best known for building a popular French dating site, Attractive World, Shapr is an app that helps you meet new professional connections. Sign up to get Backchannel's weekly newsletter, and follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Alexis Fitts is Backchannel’s senior editor.
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