Introducing: Find Your Friends' Startup

Your way to discover which of your friends have startups or are working at startups

Have you ever met someone and had some email exchanges, and then later forgotten which startup he or she works at? Maybe you exchanged emails in the past, but you can't even remember their name. Or what if you just wanted to discover more startups, that your friends or acquaintances are a part of or have started?

Now, you can do that. I am excited to announce the launch of our new service, called "Find Your Friends' Startup." The new feature allows you to tap into your contact lists to discover which of your friends or colleagues have startups on Vator. With tens of thousands of entrepreneurs, Vator has become an essential place for entrepreneurs to have a presence. Increasingly, it'll become the place where you can find their companies and track their progress.

We had a private beta testing period last week, and so far the feedback has been great.

"The Find your Friends feature on Vator is great," said Bryan McClain, Co-founder of Metric Lab. "It makes it really easy to invite friends to connect and also determine who is working at what company."

"Vator has nailed vertical discovery of startups across their vast social network of entrepreneurs and investors," said Mark Evans, Managing principal at Converge Labs. "Social networks are all about discovery and how to best leverage technology to find what you're looking for, Vator's find a friend or colleague's startup tool does exactly that and it's dead simple to use; KISS."

Of course, we want more feedback! And, we need your input to help us improve our service.

To start, go here: https://vator.tv/friends 

Don't worry about signing into one of your email accounts. We won't save your password. Nor will we send emails to you or your contact list.

What we will do, however, is look into your connections to see which of your friends have startups on Vator, or are affiliated with any startups on Vator. 

What you'll get is something that looks like this. See example below. If this was your email we looked at, we would be telling you that you have 521 friends who have startups on Vator. You are already following 134 of them. You can now follow the other 387 you don't follow.

It's up to you to decide if you want to follow them. For the companies you select to follow, they will receive a notice that you're following them. What that means is that you'll see their activity as a news feed on your Vator dashboard, and you'll get one daily email containing the activity of all the companies you're following.

But you won't be connected to the companies. So, the admins of the company profiles can't just message you, unless they connect with you and you confirm that you'd like to be connected.

On the flipside, you can also find out which of your friends or those in your professional network are already on Vator and invite them to follow your company.

In the example above, you can connect with those friends already on Vator and at the same time invite them to follow your company.

We hope you like this new feature. The goal is to help you discover more "relevant" startups. 

In the future, we'll be adding other ways you can discover startups that are relevant to you. We'll let you discover the startups your connections are following, or startups in a specific industry you're interested in.

Please give the Find Your Friends' Startup a try. And, we look forward to your feedback and suggestions! 

We'll give two free tickets to Vator Splash LA to the person that gives us the best idea for a new feature to help people discover more "relevant" startups on Vator!