Platform Founder Q&A: Hayden Williams of Treatings

Treatings is a professional networking platform based in New York City that has been called “the Tinder of the business world.” Many of us at Applico have met some very smart and interesting people on Treatings in recent months, so we were extremely excited when Treating’s co-founder Hayden Williams agreed to come give a lunch talk at Applico. After his talk, he was kind enough to sit down with me and talk more about his company. The Q&A is below.

Q: What do you see as the core value that Treatings offers? What is the value being exchanged on your platform?

A: The core value that Treatings offers is access to knowledge. We see Treatings as being an important part of the sharing economy. We believe that people’s insights and career experiences have as much latent value as any physical good they own, so we’re always looking to reduce the friction of knowledge transfer.

Q: You’ve chosen to focus on facilitating interactions between peers rather than trying to build an ‘expert network’. What made you choose this path?

A: There are platforms that do an effective job of connecting paying customers with experts. We see many instances when you don’t need to speak with an expert. For example, if you’re looking for a collaborator or trying to learn how to acquire a skill, an expert may not be as helpful as a peer, and they’ll certainly have less time to share. The trouble is that most people aren’t public facing, so they’re hard to find and may not even know they have insights that would be helpful to others.

Q: You’ve said on your blog that by imposing constraints on what kinds of behavior you allowed on Treatings, you saw more engagement. Can you give an example of that?

A: The broadest example of this would be how explicit we are that Treatings is for professional and not dating purposes. In our etiquette section we spell out that Treatings is not meant for trolling for dates. While we could have just opened up the platform to this and other use cases, that would dilute the core value of knowing that everyone on Treatings is open to talking about their work, in person.

Q: Treatings has been around for a couple years now and has a growing user base. But how did you address that initial chicken-and-egg problem?

A: Since we’re a peer-to-peer networking site, we don’t differentiate between “consumers” of knowledge and “producers” of it. Most people sign up for Treatings as a consumer, not imagining that people would be interested in their insights. People are often surprised and flattered to hear they can be a producer of knowledge when they are asked by fellow members to talk about their work.

Q: Initially, you consciously chose to limit Treating’s community to New York City. What was behind that choice?

A: We knew we had a lot to learn (and still do!) about the best way to connect strangers for one-on-one meet ups over coffee. We’ve had to release prototypes as quickly as possible to iterate based on user feedback, so it was easier to do this in one location. We opened outside NYC because our users asked us to, and were willing to share with friends in order to gain access. But, we remain focused on the product and reducing the friction between meeting people online and taking the conversation offline.

Q: What’s been the biggest obstacle to getting people to interact on Treatings?

A: The biggest obstacle is making people comfortable reaching out to strangers. Similar to dating sites, the only way to facilitate this behavior is having a community built from the ground up for that express purpose. We’ve done a lot of work on user profiles and surfacing information about people that fellow members can identify with and use as a way to break the ice.

Q: Have you had to change how you design your core interaction?

A: An early iteration of the platform relied on people proactively offering meetings. There were two problems with this:

People don’t wake up in the morning with the problem of having to offer a meeting.
Many people, especially those more junior, would never offer a meeting because they’d feel presumptuous doing so.

So, we changed the framework so that everyone is open to introductions, and members can approach whomever they choose and offer to treat them to a coffee. This way, people don’t have to believe they have insights that anyone would care about – we leave that for others to decide.

Q: Do you see your business expanding to include other users groups in the future?

A: We’re most focused on Millennials, who have undeveloped, homogeneous professional networks and the motivation to reach outside of them, given that they’re early in their career. But there are many reasons why Millennials want to reach outside their network, whether for peer-to-peer collaboration, freelance opportunities or exploring skills and companies of interest. We’ll continue to watch to see how people are utilizing Treatings to make it easier to help people find the professionals they’re looking for.

Q: Why is being on mobile important for your platform?

A: As an online/offline platform, people need the ability to access the site on the run. For example, if you’re running late to a meeting, you need to be able to easily message the other person to notify them. Also, with an app we can utilize features native to phones, such as geo-location, to show users who is currently near them and open to meeting.

For more, check out Applico CEO Alex Moazed’s recent interview with Redpoint Ventures’ Ryan Sarver, former Director of Platform at Twitter.

Filed under: Platform Innovation | Topics: chicken and egg, platform innovation, Platform Startup Advisory, platforms