HOW LINKUP GOT STARTED AND DEVELOPED

This is a long story, with many aspects. Please be patient.

I've learned in life that with truly comprehensive planning and profound foresight, combined with a meticulously cautious approach and carefully maintained awareness all along the way, you'll still end up somewhere you never could have possibly anticipated.

Strand #1

In May of 2003 I responded to a posting on Craigslist for a lunch club in San Francisco, and was immediately put off by the awkwardness of their process: respond to a posting, wait to receive an email message with an MS Word attachment, struggle with the form in the Word document, send the revised document back as an attachment, receive another email message as confirmation of membership (all with no web site for reference), then respond by email to lunch invitations, without having any idea of who the other members were, or who would be attending any given event, and without being able to create your own events.

I approached the person who was running the lunch club, and offered to streamline his process by building a web database for signups as well as a basic RSVP system for events. I simply thought this would be helpful to everyone, and I offered to do all the work for free, no strings attached.

His response to my offer was territorial and defensive. He turned down my offer, and turned it down flat. Control was more important to him than doing something that would actually help people. I knew his lunch club was going to fail quickly because of the flaws in its process, but his response had truly irritated me.

It turns out that irritation, if strong enough, can become inspiration.

I hated that lunch club guy's blind, territorial, utterly selfish response. I hated that he didn't want to improve what obviously was not serving people. I hated that he controlled all the events, and that you couldn't even see who might be attending. I hated how ridiculous it was to use a form in MS Word as an attachment to email to collect membership information. I hated how difficult and time consuming and awkward the entire process was. Most of all, I hated that he was so unwilling to accept suggestions that would be helpful to everyone, including him.

Strand #2

At about this same time, I was working for the presidential primary campaign of Howard Dean. I witnessed and experienced personally how effective the web can be in bringing people together in person with ease, and generating new possibilities with every new meeting.

In the Dean campaign anyone involved in the campaign could create an event, and the campaign was brilliant in encouraging people to exercise their own initiative in creating events. You could also search for events easily in your immediate geographic area, see who was already planning to attend, and then RSVP for someone else's event. There was a marvelous spirit of hospitality and reciprocal effort.

The Dean campaign had created its own event planning software for this, which was very effective, with some major flaws:

1) Often 50% or more of the people who had RSVP'd wouldn't show up.

2) Often 50% or more people of the people who did show up had never RSVP'd.

The campaign also made use of Meetup.com for larger monthly events, and I learned a lot about what not to do from the Meetup site, including:

  • Don't lock people into using particular venues, just because you have deals with those venues.
  • Don't lock people into a rigid schedule, just because it's convenient for you, but not necessarily for them.
  • Don't ever allow a meeting to be scheduled without an official host for the meeting, who is responsible for every aspect of the event.

    So the key seemed to be to support and encourage the initiative of each person, producing an ongoing bloom of new possibilities, while providing strong quality control and always acting in the interest of those involved.

    Strand #3

    At the same time as all of this, I had become sadly addicted to a site called Ryze.com, a so-called "online community." My addiction lasted four months. During this time I observed many people treating other people very badly via computer, because they knew they would problably never meet, and never be held accountable. Instances of "flaming" and verbal abuse were common on that site. To my shame, I also began to occasionally treat other people badly through my keyboard and computer screen. I still regret this deeply, and the experience sickened and appalled me. One day, I simply canceled my Ryze.com account with a sense of relief.

    Yet on Craigslist I found the same thing: verbal and emotional abuse and an utter lack of accountability which made it impossible to have a discussion that did not rapidly degenerate into name calling and pointless nonsense.

    Even on the bulletin boards for the Commonwealth Club, an organization known for its insistence on civilized discourse, I found the same lack of accountability, lack of good manners, and the same rapid degeneration into senseless, destructive diatribes and drivel.

    What was going on here? Was there something about the web itself that promoted nasty, ruthless behavior? Was it the lack of any accountability? Was it the phony screen names people used on the web as a kind of evil mask? Was it that people never met in person, and so had never heard each other's voices, or looked in each other's eyes?

    Sadly, it was all of the above.

    Bay Area Lunch Club is Born, and Becomes Bay Area Linkup

    So there I was, pissed off at the bad process of someone else's little lunch club, impressed by the Dean campaign's use of the web, but depressed by much of what I found on the web, particularly the awful misnomer "online community." How can it be a "community" if no one ever actually meets?

    In June of 2003 I gave up on the lunch club I had signed up for, having never attended even one of their events, due to the awkwardness of their process. I was still very irritated by everything that didn't make sense in their process, so one day I started programming a signup process and event RSVP process that made sense to me. The goal was clear: effectiveness, obviousness and a beautiful simplicity. I had also learned from both Craigslist and Google that speed matters, and matters a lot, and that speed is directly reliant on the absence of large graphics.

    I did this programming purely out of my deep irritation with someone else's flawed process. Once I had finished the programming though, I saw that what I had done was very, very useful. I bought a domain name: bayarealunchclub.com. I launched the site, and put up a posting on Craigslist. Because the process was so easy and so streamlined, applications began streaming in.

    I was shocked. Am I really doing this? Wasn't I just pissed off at somebody else's crappy, sloppy process? I'm not really doing this, am I? And what exctly am I doing, anyway?

    Well, if all these people are signing up, I guess we need to have some events. So I did that. For six months, I was the only person scheduling events, even though it was clear that anyone could create an event. It was exhausting being the only person creating events, and I was getting burned out and was ready to just shut the damn site down and walk away.

    Then a few other people created events, and everyone else noticed, and then more people created events. This began to get interesting, mostly because it was clear that because everyone is different, everyone has different ideas for events. So what I had learned from the Dean campaign was becoming a reality, as the creativity and initiative of other people on the site came into play.

    Soon there were so many events that people began demanding something other than just lunch. I thought again of Mr. Badly Designed Lunch Club, and was still so annoyed by his unresponsive attitude that I immediately said yes to the new suggestion, even though it meant changing the name of the group, and doing a whole lot more programming.

    By this time the other guy's lunch club had officially crashed and burned, because "it had become too much of a hassle." What a surprise.

    Bay Area Lunch Club now needed a new name to accommodate all kinds of events, and my partner Andrea suggested Bay Area Linkup. I liked the multiple meanings of linking people up at events, by means of links on the web. So Bay Area Lunch Club became Bay Area Linkup.

    How the Accountability System Got Started

    Then I began to notice a major problem. Too many people were signing up for events and then not showing up, creating unpleasant and unwelcome challenges for hosts, and creating lasting disappointment for everyone--hosts, guests, the entire group. Absurdly, some of the worst flakes complained bitterly about other people flaking out.

    I recognized that a negative feedback system was at work, in which the more that people let each other down, the more likely everyone was, because they had been let down, to then let other people down. My opinion was that asking people to change their behavior voluntarily was not going to accomplish anything other than annnoying everyone, because those who behaved responsibly would feel unjustly accused, those who were flakes wouldn't want it brought up directly, and the entire subject might poison the group. I also knew from experience that until consequences are directly attached to actions, you can blab all you want, but nothing's going to change.

    I thought about this problem for a long time, and finally concluded that the only way to address the problem was to actually measure individual behavior, and then assign clear, direct and unpleasant consequences to inconsiderate behavior. In other words, if you let other people down with inconsiderate behavior, if you break your social commitments to people who are counting on you, the more you do so, the more difficult it will be for you to sign up for events in the future. Thus the Linkup accountability system was born.

    When the accountability system was first installed, I was terrified. I thought everyone would rebel, and flee, and badmouth Linkup in the process. I believed deeply in the accountability system, but I was terrified that people would react badly to it.

    Instead what happened was people began to notice the advantages of being able to count on the other people showing up, hosts began to have more confidence, and the variety of events increased dramatically because hosts and prospective hosts didn't have to worry so much about getting burned by the flakes. Instead of fleeing Linkup, members began to spread the word, which actually led to the next big problem.

    Bay Area Linkup Becomes a Membership System

    Due to the expanded event categories, and the reliability of events based on the Linkup accountability system, there was a surge in applications, and new events. In only nine months, our modest little lunch club had climbed to 2,000 members, and hit a peak of 210 events in one month, in February of 2004. I was working about 50 hours per week on Linkup, and I was doing all this with no source of income, and now under pressure from members to open additional sites in other cities using the Linkup software.

    After a lot of discussion with members, I concluded that the only approach that made sense was to make Bay Area Linkup a membership subscription system. Bay Area Linkup converted to a paid membership model on May 5, 2004, at $4.95 per month. This provides enough revenue to keep all of the Linkup sites going, though Bay Area Linkup is the only site with a paid membership system.

    Gradually Linkup expanded to a few other major metropolitan areas, and is now in 28 cities.

    In this series of changes and developments over the past few years, I have a certain pride in what we have accomplished together:

  • I am proud to have listened to people, and responded to their requests.
  • I am proud of all the hosts who created such wonderful events, to the benefit of all who participated.
  • I am proud to have helped provide an environment in which people can easily expand the resources for their lives.
  • I am proud of all those people--so many people--who contributed excellent ideas for improving Linkup.
  • I am proud to have contributed to the encouragement of integrity and accountabilty.
  • I am proud to have put on public dispay the advantages to all of us of integrity and accountability.

    Thank you very much for your time and attention. I hope you will find Linkup a service of value to you personally.

    Regards,

    Firinn Taisdeal, Founder
    Linkup Central: http://linkupcentral.com