Mark - user journey

• Mark, a university student who moved to Canada all the way from Brazil to pursue his undergraduate degree just 3 weeks ago.
• He has been finding it hard to find people to talk to that would lead to long-term friendships.
• He has tried going to club events, but it was too crowded and too general. He unfortunately wasn’t able to actually get to talk to someone and form some sort of connection with them in there
• So he took matters into his own hands
• He started approaching random people and tried having lunch with other students. Unfortunately, after several attempts, he realized that a lot of people are not really interested in meeting new people. And some people are just not the kind of people he wants to be around or be friends with.
• So he wished to be able to know, before committing to sit with someone, if they are willing to actually make friends or be in a relationship.
• He also wanted to find people who are interested in having a specific kind of conversation or a debate. But unfortunately, there is nothing he can do in real life to know that before hand. All he can do is hope that he other person they’re approaching is someone who they’d actually want to hang out with.
• As much as he loves interacting with people. He also values his time and sometimes he thinks to himself. “Man… I don’t know if it’s really worth approaching some stranger right now. What if I don’t vibe with them? I could have spent that time just:
  • studying
  • learning something new
  • working”
• He’d also like to know the values of this person and what they enjoy doing in their day-to-day life. Mark believes that meeting up with people sometimes is exhausting, and if it’s not rewarding, he would be resistant to actually meet up with these people and wouldn’t really enjoy his time.
• As he was researching solutions, he discovers an application built to solve that exact problem for both, cold approaching friends and potential partners.
• That night, he decides to give this application a try
• He creates an account, gives himself a username of “slingshot69” because why not and answers a series of questions provided by the app
  • He was at first hesitant, but Because he has heard about the company behind this and how much they value their customers and are extremely transparent in everything they do, He felt like He was able to trust them, and they mentioned that this Information is never shared to anyone within the app, unless you’ve accepted a request from someone else to meet up with you (more on that later)
  • So, after an extensive onboarding process that got him to think deeply about who he really is on the inside, the next step was to get verified as a student by scanning his university ID. This ensures that the application can confirm that the user is a university student and that the user is actually who they claim to be.
    • This elevated his level of trust with the app even more.
• After he was done with the instant verification, he was finally ready to create a request to meet up with someone the next day for lunch. He sets the meeting time to 12:00pm until 12:30pm since he has only thirty minutes to spare before he has to go back to his lectures
  • He really enjoyed the flexibility the app offers and its ability to make meetups feel less intimidating
  • As he creates his meetup request, he specifies that he would like to talk about “How to make the best of your university experience”
  • As he writes that down, he gets suggestions for possible conversation starters he could have with the person he is meeting up with. One particular conversation starter caught his eye
    • “What is one thing that you plan to do more of during your time in university?”
  • So he decides to use that in the request details
• As soon as Mark clicks send on the request at 11pm, he goes straight into deep sleep because of how exhausted he was.
• Mark wakes up to his request being approved by several users.
• As he was looking through the list of users and their personal information and preferences, he noticed that ‘imjustken’ seemed like a very interesting person who’s on an exchange program coming from Japan.
  • Mark has always been interested in Japanese culture, especially after he started doing jiu-jitsu and judo. So he decides to approve that request
• After approving the request, they were instantly taken to a chat interface with ‘imjustken’
• Mark introduces himself and asks Ken if he would be down to meet up beside Bake Chef. Ken responds with a simple but genuine “Sure! Let’s do it!”
• So, Mark schedules his location to be shared at 11:58 a.m. to make it easy for Ken to find Mark.
• As the clock approaches 11:57, Mark receives a notification confirming that he wants to share his location to Ken as he was speedwalking from class to Bake Chef.
• As Mark was about to sit at the table, He catches Ken looking around for him. So he waves at him until he sees him.
• As they settle in and order a sandwich from Bake Chef. They start talking about their experiences in their first few weeks in university, their first impressions and what they want to do moving forward.
• Towards the end of the conversation, as they were about to wrap up their sandwich and head to class, they realized they never even asked that conversation starter that Mark wrote. They both had a lot to share and a lot to talk about, but unfortunately, they both had to go to class, so they cut it short and shared contact information so that they would meet up for lunch again tomorrow.