Use Cases for HyperConnector

1. Founder - Investor Relationship

Description: Founders and Investors traditionally struggle to understand key information before their meetings from the other. Each is communicating part of this game which needs to be synchronized to be able to meet the other’s needs. Most of the time investors are searching and collecting companies to be able to track because they are syndicating another funding round (meaning they don’t have money to invest ‘today’, but maybe you will make the list ‘tomorrow’ when they are dispersing funds).

So what does this synchronicity look like? 

Figure 1: This is a graph of sin(x), cos(x), and tan(x) - notice the intersection of the green, blue, and orange lines at a key point. This is much like what occurs between founders and investors during the funding cycle.

Funding Process from the Founder side:

1. Put together a list of founder connections who are either currently going through funding, or who have been through the process of funding with investors.
2. After pulling this list together, founders start to put together connections through their founder friends. These connections will structure themselves into three categories of investors: funders (they fund your company), feedback givers (they will prepare you for the next conversation), or investor sherpas (these introduce you to their network of friends - who are also investors).
3. From here - founders will begin the arduous journey of booking meetings (one meeting at a time) to get the chance to meet with investors, and you never know who is going to be what before the conversation so you need to tread lightly as you develop these relationships.
4. Now with the first meeting down, you get warm fuzzy feelings about meeting with the investor and they want to book a second meeting (typically takes around 4 to 5 meetings to get a clear ‘yes’ or ‘no’ from an investor.
5. 6 months have gone by of full-time, back-to-back meetings with investors, and now the founder is running out of cash and has capital soft-committed (meaning its a ‘yes’ but… there are contingencies).
6. The founder starts to call for the capital (meaning he needs money in the bank), the problem is that the soft-commits they have gotten from investors are no longer able to happen, because the time frame was too long and the capital the investor had for the founder got allocated to another venture who was able to satisfy the contingency the investor had spoken about. 
7. The founder then needs to shutter the business because they were unable to raise the necessary capital.

Problem:

The founder did not have an adequate network to be able to solicit the capital. They weren’t able to get the necessary feedback to help them with the next conversation. They weren’t able to syndicate the necessary funds to be able to move them forward.

Solution:

HyperConnector crowdsources feedback from all interactions (personal or professional). Find out if the investor you are meeting with is meeting with other founders. If they are, you can see the feedback founders are giving to see if the synchronous timing is the same as where you are with your business. Don’t waste your time meeting with an investor who is not going to help you move your business forward. Only meet with the ones that are helping founders.

Funding Process from the Investor side:

1. The investor just got the green light from his limited partners to syndicate the funds for his investment thesis - he has these funds ‘accessible’ but they are not in the fund’s bank account because the general partner does not have the companies yet to be able to invest the funds for the partners. There is some return on investment he needs to get with the companies he invests in. Because of the investment thesis it hyper limits the number of companies he can work with, but that’s ok because he has the necessary deal flow (conversations with founders) booked out for the next few months because of this exciting new fund.
2. Meetings with founders are taking place, it’s the same conversations, same questions, same responses. It’s getting pretty boring now… I wish we could convey more information to founders about where they need to be for this fund, what we directly invest in, and what would get my limited partners excited for this fund.
3. After months of back-to-back meetings with hopeful founders, I find a few founders I can at least get this investment process started. I start to call the limited partners to call for the funds (meaning the money that will get used to invest in these businesses).
4. They ask some questions about the founders and the businesses that we are going to invest in directly. I now have the physical funds and I start to call the founders to disperse the check. Out of 10 companies for this fund, only 1 of them will most likely pay me back and create the return for the fund. But for me to ‘know’ this is going to happen, I have made some promises for each founder to help them with their business - this could be networking connections, potential first customers, or something else which will help me be able to achieve the ROI I need as the general partner.
5. Problem is, I still don’t have accurate visibility or a great understanding for how this business will succeed from the side. Depending on my attitude I may be more hands-on or hands-off depending on the success of the founder and their business over time.

Problem:

The investor is concerned about the capital they put into a startup at various stages (huge upside, but frequent downside). Typically this is because the investor is either too heavy handed and doesn’t trust the founder (ousts them with board power), or doesn’t have the belief that the startup is selling to the right customer so they shift the business plan and force startups into rabbit holes which delays product development considerably.

Solution:

HyperConnector helps you track founder conversations over time. Track interactions founders are having over time and be able to see through their conversations if they are making suitable progress or not through previously intangible context. 

* This is the hill I will die on - I believe that the more conversations, connections, and networking done for founders will result in success of the company. If you are able to lay down your pride and hear feedback over and over and over again, your business will be so creative and so unique a defensible moat will happen naturally and your customers will find you through aggregated connections over time.

2. Content Creators needing Collaborations

Description:

The monthly income for a content creator (podcaster, blogger, vlogger) is based off a few different factors, but it boils down to content and collaborations. The more collaborations you can accomplish the more cross-pollination of audiences that occur with your following. This is essential for anyone looking to grow their brand over time.

The Flakey Collaboration:

1. You have a successful channel with a growing audience and you see another channel that is pretty tangential to what you are producing and you want to see if they would be interested in collaborating.
2. They are definitely interested.
3. You go through the discussions.
4. As time goes on, they start to show their level of interest by starting to flake on meetings and you aren’t getting a great feeling about working with them long term.

The Moody Collaboration:

This collaboration is not flakey, they make all the meetings, but they seem to always be ‘impeding’ the progress. They aren’t great to work with in general, more of a ‘my way, or the highway’ vibe with collaborating.

The never coherent collaboration:

This collaboration makes all the meetings and is highly agreeable, but it doesn’t feel like your best work. It feels like the collaboration is along for the ride and you are doing all the work. That’s never a good feeling, you want to make something special and this connection is not bringing anything to the table.

Problem:

Your cold-lead reach out emails are too good! They solicit everyone and their mother to collaborate with you and you have your own set of metrics in people to work with to grow your brand and your audience. You wish you could understand what it would be like to work with someone who is ‘at your level’ but it’s always a gamble and you are more miss than hit.

Solution:

HyperConnector crowdsources feedback from all interactions. This means you have the capability of seeing not only how collaborations do with the small interactions, but what they are like professionally as well. Are they flakey? (Your referrals are giving this connection 1-star mentioning they missed one meeting out of 10.) Ok, he misses the occasional meeting. Is this connection moody? Well it looks like out of 14 recent reviews the most helpful review is one where he is always consistently happy and coherent to work with, even on the bad days.

3. Customer - Contractor Relationship

Description:

You just moved to a new city, your network is thousands of miles away. A pipe burst in your new home and you need a plumber ASAP! Who do you turn to? How do you do research to make sure you can get the job done for the cheapest cost? Here’s another scenario to spotlight more specialized work. You are a freelance web designer and you speak with hundreds of prospective clients every month. The conversion rate for your business is the industry average at 2.35% (according to contentgrip.com). This means that for every 100 conversations you have as a freelancer, only 2 of them are going to convert to business - this is approximately 49 hours of meetings needed if you are booking 30-minute intro conversations before you convert a customer.

Process for clients through my Previous Photography Business:

1. Leads, emails, and contact forms would flow in to my business (either through email, referrals, or my website).
2. I would send over an email further reducing the number of potentials which would articulate my business process as well as cost for my services.
3. Refining these clients, I would then book a phone call with the prospective client to get some additional information.
4. I would send over a contract to get a signature stating the working relationship/agreement.
5. From here I would have a signed contract and a 50% downpayment from the client.
6. The photography gig would occur.
7. I would send back proofs of the photos.
8. I would get the last 50% of the payment.
9. Then I would send over the final photos to the client who approved the photos based off the photo proofs.

Problem:

How many customer interactions did you count there? How many contractor interactions does it take before a job is complete? Not only do you (as the customer) need to have an accurate understanding of how these contractors operate over time, but as the contractor you want to have an understanding about how the client is going to want to work/operate during the contracting position.

Solution:

HyperConnector crowdsources interactions over time. This means that if you feel like you got slighted, provide the feedback to help the contractor be more effective in their position. The caveat is that future clients that look at your review may think you were being too harsh and will discount your review (if it’s just the one); however, if its more than 5 and it seems like it’s a repeated pattern then prospective clients will take notice and ask for concessions.

4. Making Referrals for your Connections

Description:

You are talking to a great friend about their business and they need some help figuring out their next steps. This could mean they need a website for their business (but they don’t know anything about website development), this could also mean they need additional talent to help them with their outrageous success (but who knows talent recruiters? No one unless you have been networking for a long time).

Process for making referrals:

1. A friend is chatting with you and they make an ‘ask’, you immediately think of someone in your network that you want to introduce your friend to, but you aren’t sure how it’s going to go over. You have already made referrals for this connection and it’s been a mixed bag of reviews with your network. Do you really want to expend more social capital on this friend?
2. You make the introduction to the friend.
3. You get a review that doesn’t give you any feedback over the connection. Lame.
   

Problem:

You want to help your friends by giving referrals, but you are concerned about expending useless social capital for friends that are wasting the connection opportunity. How can you fix this? 

Solution:

HyperConnector provides the ability to track your referrals given. When someone gives you a referral the contact card changes to show that you have received a connection from that connection. If you are the one giving the connection you can tell the server system which ‘connection’ to pull and average. These connection forms will then aggregate over time to show you how ‘well’ the referral worked. This is all done without you needing to work at all.

5-star referrals get you rewarded!

5. Talent Acquisition Recruiters

Description:

You are seeking talent for companies and you come across hundreds of potentially great candidates. How do you keep track of who to introduce to who? You say to yourself, “I met someone last week who would be really good for this position, what was his name? We spoke about engineering and his cat, Felix.”

Process for Recruiters:

1. I chat with hundreds of candidates, I filter candidates into good, better, best and start making referrals for companies. My CRM tracking system is good, but its still a numbers game and it’s time consuming. 
2. Finally after what seems like a ton of connections, I get a referral fee for introducing the right candidate to a company that wants to hire the candidate. This decision is based off relationship management and intangible understanding.
3. I get money through the transaction of the introduction.

Problem:

You chat with hundreds of potential candidates and only a small percentage are quality enough to be able to make it through the hiring process (63% of recruiters say that their biggest problem is not being able to find enough suitable candidates to fill open positions. - legaljobs.io). How can you screen candidates before you meet with them (giving your time away - According to job interview statistics for 2022, 92% of recruiters screen candidates via social media, and 87% of recruiters use LinkedIn. - from Time Doctor). Even with all this information you aren’t able to make a clear decision on whether this candidate is going to show up to work everyday and put in the work.

Solution:

HyperConnector shows you 360 degree interaction feedback from everyone your candidates are chatting with on a regular basis. See what your potential candidate is working on directly and see if they are interested in the work you are discussing in the interview process. This also means that you can see if the candidate is ever late for work, missing meetings, not understanding client relations more fully, or doesn’t adhere to company dress code. All without needing to shake their hand for the first time and waste your time making assumptions.