Intros AI

How the Retail Success Conference helps attendees

network

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Intros at a glance

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Intros Made
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The Challenge

The Retail Success Summit is the world’s premier educational conference for independent retailers, running successfully for 18 years and counting.

The Retail Success Summit team identified three primary challenges in delivering impactful networking:

  1. Fragmented Networking Opportunities: With hundreds of attendees, traditional approaches to networking often left participants feeling overwhelmed and unsure of whom to connect with.
  2. Maximizing Engagement Across Diverse Attendees: Attendees ranged from new business owners to seasoned retailers, requiring tailored connections to ensure value for all participants.
  3. Demonstrating Tangible ROI: Organizers wanted to provide measurable networking outcomes to justify the investment of attendees and sponsors, while creating memorable experiences to boost retention for future events.

How Retail Success Conference connected attendees

Intros AI provided the Retail Success Summit with a comprehensive solution to deliver meaningful connections before, during, and after the event:

‍Pre-Event Networking:
Attendees were matched based on their business goals, challenges, and interests using data from registration forms and enriched profiles.Personalized introduction emails, complete with conversation starters, were sent two weeks before the event to kick-start connections and build anticipation.

‍In-Event Networking:
Real-time matchmaking during the three-day Summit ensured attendees had curated networking opportunities at scheduled times. Attendees could access their matches through an intuitive interface, which seamlessly guided them to meaningful conversations.

‍Post-Event Follow-Ups:
Attendees received additional introductions and follow-up recommendations after the Summit, enabling them to continue the relationships formed during the event.Organizers were provided with detailed analytics on networking outcomes, including match satisfaction and engagement trends.

The custom-built algorithm

After adding all 7 factors to the algorithm, matches were based upon the weights shown in the pie chart to the right.

Intros’ proprietary machine-learning algorithm took all of these datapoints into account!

Finding Common Interests

We matched people with a common goal and compatible areas of expertise. So, we used the "similarity" matching for goals and the "give and take" matching for compatible skills (where each person can support the other person).

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Matching on Shared Experiences

Since attendees came from a variety of backgrounds and experiences, we matched them based on industry, and size of company. This was important to ensure the attendees were getting relevant connections.

“There’s a lot about the algorithm what about the actual matches? 🤔”

Making a Match
Introducing Megan & Jonathan 👋🏼

Megan Giacobetti
CEO of V1 @ Michigan
Megan is the Chief Executive Officer of V1 @Michigan, the community for ambitious student builders at the University of Michigan. Megan joined On Deck in the hopes of finding a technical co-founder to help her build a business that spreads mental health awareness.
Jonathan Pierre
Growth @Envision Accelerator
Jonathan Pierre works in Growth @Envision Accelerator, a community-driven accelerator for young, underrepresented founders. Jonathan joined the On Deck Intros club to find someone with experience in fundraising and product management.
The Match

Megan and Jonathan met in 2021 through the On Deck Intros Club. After just the second week of opt-ing in, the perfect match was between the two was found.

Intros made the match for three main reasons:
1
They had complementary skills through Intros “Give & Take” question mentioned earlier
2
They both wanted to spend all of their time (40+ hours) to build something truly impactful as quickly as possible
3
They were both extremely passionate about mental health and wanted to solve problems they felt were affecting the next generation disproportionately.

“I would have never imagined I would find my lifelong co-founder through an Intros club. However, it did a perfect job at finding what we cared about the most and making a seamless introduction between us. And for that, we’re eternally grateful”

- Megan Giacobetti & Jonathan Pierre

Moving Forward

In 2022, Jonathan and Megan have made large strides in creating the company that will address the next generation’s mental health challenges called Headspace. They have raised many rounds of funding and are quickly growing to become a next-gen leader in the space.

Megan and Jonathan still meet using the On Deck Intros club to this day to find more talented co-founders to join them on their mission.

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Overall Impact

When members within the OnDeck community were matched, they were given all of the information from these questions, and our matching algorithm was able to make ideal matches based on all the percentages of weigh you see above. It is really difficult to find other young, aspiring founders - much less screen them for availability and accountability you want in a co-founder. This Intros club proved to be incredibly powerful for the OnDeck community, and will be started up again when the new batch of aspiring founders comes through the OnDeck pipeline.