Product Analysis — Lunchclub

Over the past year, one product that delighted me was lunchclub. It’s is a platform that facilitates 1–1 online meetings with people whom you would find interesting and relevant. Till date I met ~25+ people through the platform and the best part is the wide variety of people you meet. To give you a glimpse, here’s a description of few people I met:

• A techie solopreneur based out of Canada who builds products either for clients or out of passion, and is currently building a Whatsapp based chatbot that delivers you a 2 min motivational audio note every morning.
• Co-founder of Leaf studios (sold about a million audio products)
• A VC who’s building a corporate insurance product as a side-gig
• An MBA student from IIM who’s started up twice before and is joining Salesforce as a Product Manager.
• A psychology major who’s currently a career counsellor.

After every call, I am left amazed at how much can one learn and share in a single 45 min conversation. I tried few other platforms that does a similar thing and nothing comes close to Lunchclub. They’re funded by one of the best VCs in the world — a16z. So, I spent sometime to analyse what makes them unique and successful (so far).

In the first couple of years, Lunchclub nailed down their focus on 3 things.

1. Get variety of people on the platform (Acquisition)
2. Match them with people they’d love to interact with (User Delight)
3. Inspire users to come back and meet more people (Retention)

In this article, I focus on the first part — Acquisition. I discussed User Delight and Retention in the followup article.

True Product-Led Growth

This platform is only as good as the people who’re part of this. If you don’t find the people you’re meeting relevant, you’d not come back. So, Lunchclub started as an invite-only platform to ensure there’s some vetting done on who’s joining. Next challenge is how to nudge users to invite relevant folks. Here are 3 things done by Lunchclub to drive their Product-Led Growth that stood out for me.

1. Show the impact you’re making

Lunchclub shows me a tree chart (only a click away from home screen) that shows a picture as shown below:

• It tells me how many people joined Lunchclub because of me. If I refer A, who refers B, it counts as B joined Lunchclub thanks to me.
• How many new connections were made (total number of meetings done by people I invited).
• Inspiring CTA — Plant another seed is so much better than Refer someone

2. If impact doesn’t inspire you, probably a leaderboard will?

Gamification has been one technique lot of products use. While most of the attempts seem rather forced, Lunchclub did a decent job to use gamification to increase their user base. Here’s what stands out for me:

1. Localised leaderboard: I’m in top 10 as the leaderboard shows super inviters in Gurgaon. If it’s India/Global, I’ll probably be in 100s and won’t have any motivation to look at the leaderboard.
2. CTA (again): Leaderboards motivate the competitive ones and Climb to the top is a great way to get them to click on that button.

3. Relevance and Ease of Referrals

Where should the user land if he/she clicks on the CTA from the above steps?For most apps, it just opens up a social network like Whatsapp where they can invite users. But user needs to think whom to refer, and that’s a lot of cognitive effort. This is where Lunchclub makes it interesting. Look at the image below. While it looks similar to Facebook’s “Add Friend” option, it’s not that simple. Facebook or Linkedin calculate mutual connects on their platforms and recommend you people with a lot of mutual connects.

Lunchclub looks at your social media handles and mobile number (whichever you grant access). It does a cross-reference with similar data on other users on the platform and recommend you based on number of connections that contact has on Lunchclub. You can shuffle and see who else you can invite or invite all of them with the click of a single button.

You can read the follow-up article on Lunchclub retention strategies here. If you read till here and want to try the platform, use my invite link here. If there are other apps whose product-led acquisition inspires you, please share in the comments. I’d love to hear (and try) them.