📅 July's North County SD Startup Mixer

Hey — It’s Hussein 👋

Hope you are all having a great summer. We just got back from a trip to London - incredible city! 🇬🇧

Quick things on the North County SD Startup Mixer front:

1. The next event is scheduled for 📅 July 31st (register here). I didn’t want to skip a month, but my schedule is a bit crazy these days. I hope you can make it. We’ll go back to the second Wednesday of the month in August.

2. Remember to update your profile on Startup Beach before the event. I will be using it again to send matches. (Read below for a refresher on what these matches are.)

That’s it for now.

For those interested, read on for more details on Matches and Startup Beach.

-Hussein ✌️

If you’ve ever been to an event hosted by Neal Bloom, you’ll notice that he greets everyone who shows up and makes it a point to connect each attendee with another attendee. I’ve met many great San Diegans this way who I keep in touch with and see often past Neal’s event.

When I started hosting the North County SD Startup Mixer in Encinitas, I tried to replicate this. I made it a point to make sure everyone who came to the mixer had someone to talk to.

This was much easier with 20 on the guest list. Now that the mixer usually has over 150 attendees, it’s gotten a lot harder.

After a quick chat with Neal and thinking through this problem, I started writing a matching algorithm (using combinatorial optimization, heuristic scoring, and linear programming) that would review people’s profiles, backgrounds, interests, etc., and match them together.

In order for the algorithm to do a good job, I needed information from each attendee about their background, roles, functions, interests, industry etc. While using event management platforms like Luma and Eventbrite you can capture some of this information by asking questions it was very limited and hard to extract the information so my algorithm can use it.

After giving up on making the algorithm work with existing event ticketing platforms. I decided to build my own using the no code platform, Bubble. A good friend works there and I’ve been wanting to give it a try for a while. This seemed like the best excuse to finally do that.

With Startup Beach and the matchmaking algorithm available, making sure everyone has someone to talk to at in person events is now a reality. 🎉

Feedback from the June event was very positive.

Those that saw the matches email and followed through to meet their matches loved it. Every match was a hit!

The only change I need to make before the July event is making sure only those with a profile picture are eligible for matchmaking otherwise it would be really hard for people to find each other.

Unfortunately, many missed the matches email and didn’t know this was a thing. Some also didn’t fill out their Startup Beach profile, so they didn’t get any matches.

For the July event, I am going to modify the matches emails to make sure everyone sees their match before the event and meets them at the event!

I love seeing the startup ecosystem in San Diego grow and get stronger and stronger. With that in mind, I am making Startup Beach available to anyone in San Diego who wants to host startup events.

Jonah (aka Social Coyote) will use it for his next Coyote Coffee meetup!

If you host events or want to try hosting, click the host event button the next time you log in and get started. Let me know if you need help.

I hope this explains why I created Startup Beach and the Matching Algorithm. If you have any feedback, questions, or requests, send them my way!

See you on the 31st!
— Hussein ✌️