Lunchclub: Build an intro tool for Gmail

Photo by Taylor Vick on Unsplash

I was lucky enough to get introduced to Lunchclub by Alyssa Meritt back in October. I’ve been singing the praises of the service that lets you network in an age of no networking for some time now. I honestly think it’s a huge blind spot for LinkedIn. Candidly, I think LinkedIn is likely to go the way of Skype here as a MSFT acquisition.

Lunchclub’s premise is simple enough; create a profile, add some tags, a few discussion points and hook to your LinkedIn profile. Then, via their AI, they will magically find you people that might be relevant for you to do a 30 minute video conference with. It’s a cool story and they pivoted during the pandemic from in-person to video-only (quite brilliantly I think). I’ve done 56 meetings so far and am on a 13 week streak. I’m addicted to it and have built some really, really amazing connections through it. They have a fantastic product market fit (for now).

One of my professional goals for 2021 was to make as many connections as I can for people. Whether it be professional or personal, it’s all about leveraging my network to help others do what they are doing. Lunchclub helped shape that goal for me and they have really enabled it.

The intros basically go: “Bob, meet Sue. Sue, meet Bob.” and then I give some context on why I’m making the intro. I even have some canned blurbs I use for people I often make intros for (like co-founders or close colleagues).

Which brings me to the point of this post. With all of this connection making, I’m using my email to introduce people. I would absolutely love a tool that enables me to quickly and easily make introductions directly in Gmail. I would think this would manifest itself as a Chrome or Safari extension. Pick the people you want to introduce, provide a bit of context around the introduction and then pull in their LinkedIn, Twitter, FB, TikTok, etc so there is a way to get a fuller context. Think of it as the email version of the preview pane you have created in your video chat solution.

Lunchclub: could you go ahead and build this for me? :-) It would dovetail directly into what you’re already doing and be a mechanism for increasing use of Lunchclub while also allowing people to stay in their existing workflows.

PS — if this exists already, somebody please tell me.

#lazyweb #choosingbeggar