![]() It’s a very, very good way to understand people.” Though many networking groups, such as Meetup, have succeeded by siloing users by interest, Huraux believes deeply that connecting with people outside of your normal interest groups is the key to professional success. “I don’t like to read books,” he tells me, “so the best learn is to meet new people in different industries. His CEO schedule is busy, but he tries to meet at least two or three new contacts each week. It’s easy to see how that might excite someone like Huraux, who loves networking. “You didn’t tell us that you liked tennis, but we see on your Facebook or Twitter you are tweeting a lot about tennis or the US Open-this will be added to your profile,” Huraux says. (I asked Huraux to tell me what ranking my Shapr profile had earned he declined, saying, “It’s changing all the time.”) A separate program draws information about the user from the web, and uses it to further narrow their matches. Shapr adapted its algorithm to include interests (both personal and professional) as added by a user, and career level as determined by a combination of human moderators and a machine learning algorithm. Though BumbleBizz works almost exactly like the Bumble dating app, Alex Williamson, Bumble’s head of brand, said that each landing page has some details about the person’s career, and clicking through takes a user to extended professional information and career highlights. On dating apps, most of the decisions to swipe right are determined by pictures-so adapting the action for networking takes translation. “And that’s what we want to do with Shapr: Make networking a habit.” ![]() “The limit creates a habit,” he tells me. The way Huraux sees it, stopping at 15 swipes is key to forcing people to come back daily. “10 years ago, people were like, ‘Wow, you’re on JDate.’ It’s the same thing for us.” “People had to be trained to use a dating app,” says Mandy Menaker, head of PR for Shapr. 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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