Mayo

Notables

Key Functions

• Founder / CEO / and product

• Scaled team from 1 to 25

• Lead and enable 2 audience pivots

• Drive & lead all parts of the product development, design, business partnerships, marketing, and growth

Mayo exists and operates with a simple mission — to find opportunities for people to get together more in a casual, serendipitous, and non-dating way. Simply put:

Airbnb made it ok to live in a stranger’s house, Uber made it ok to hop in a stranger’s car, Mayo wants to make it ok for you to talk to anyone around in the same space and not feel awkward or weird about it.

Kind of like what Pokemon Go enabled in parks, where people gathered and were friendly, but without the intention of making more friends to begin with.

One of the first concepts of pre-Mayo started with a lunch-roulette at WeWork (co-working space) where we randomly matched members for ping pong or lunch on the fly, with zero scheduling & profiles. Members loved it and we had over 80 signed up within the first week. Many had concerns at first because they didn’t know who they were meeting with due to the lack of profile, but once they participated they loved it — expressing that it gave them an opportunity to meet someone they would otherwise never have met.

Loneliness and sense of isolation is 1 of the top 5 reasons members leave co-working spaces

After several weeks of testing, going through the Founder Institute and Startup Weekend, and talking to and observing more than 800 people, ‘Mayo’ started to materialize with emphasis on being:

• Low friction

• Hyper-local

• Quick & casual

We started interviewing and testing this new concept of Mayo until we couldn’t gather any more insightful feedback without putting the product in people’s hands and actually using it.

The first version of Mayo was only on iOS and I quickly realized acquiring users 1 at a time wouldn’t provide enough momentum. As a result our go-to market quickly shifted to partnering with co-working spaces as:

1. Building and enabling community is on top of every co-working spaces’ selling point, so the company and the community could actually benefit from Mayo

2. We could take advantage of their reach, authority, and member pools

5 partnerships were established with co-working spaces in Seattle but ultimately we were forced to make the first pivot shortly after due to lack of resources from both sides. We weren’t able to provide enough support for co-working space staff, and the staff were too busy with their day to day operations to help introduce Mayo to members.

After co-working spaces I was able to establish contacts within the University of Washington and partnered with the new student orientation program for a pilot of Mayo. Within the first 3 months  we were able to achieve:

• Recruitment of 20+ interns

• 250% user growth

• Overwhelmingly positive feedbacks from students & staff showing support of Mayo

As the team grew, more structure was needed to lead the organization so 4 functional pillars were created, each with their own goals and task management for better collaboration and evaluation.

In order to help the teams be more productive we setup weekly team syncs, weekly CEO updates, and also monthly all-hands meeting to get everyone together.

With the entire team being remote, and needing to work with different groups time to time, we relied heavily on quite a long list of essential tools like:

• Slack (Communication)

• Trello (Running Sprints, task management, documentations)

• Google Docs (PRD, interviews, note taking, feedback gathering)

• Figma (Single source of truth for design)

• Github (Repository)

• Bitrise (Automating builds)

• Hotjar/Firebase (behavioral analytics and heat maps)

• Zoom (meetings)

For the interns we ran a bi-weekly buddy system where they get paired up with someone new to take on tasks together. It fostered friendliness, enabled team work, increased accountability, and we later found it also dramatically increased engagement with the entire team (more than 3x) along with increased productivity (2x).

Individual teams ran their own weekly sync-ups and the leads (product, dev, marketing) also had weekly syncs together to keep everyone informed. Before the pandemic we hosted monthly team gatherings to boost morale and get everyone face to face time.

However, as positive as the outlook seems, the COVID-19 pandemic hit and the entire campus and dorms were shut down. Both a blessing and a curse, we are forced to pivoted yet again to apartment buildings and gated communities (like senior homes) in order to help more people during this special time. All of our team and interns elected to extend their duration with Mayo as we pushed on. 

Based on our interviews with co-working spaces and community managers, as well as our own internal needs, we also built a dashboard that enables monitoring, posting, and responding to Mayo’s activity in designated regions.

The go to market strategy this time was to start from the ground up and learn first about this new community we’re about to tap into. We conducted 30 interviews with random apartment residents and were able to identify 5 would-be ambassadors. The pandemic also coincided with the Black Lives Matter movement as we saw Seattle’s very own Capitol Hill turned into the infamous CHOP zone (Capitol Hill Organized Protest).

The team had self-organized a few outings to support the community, and were in discussion with the leaders of CHOP to adopt Mayo as the go to communication tool — shortly before they were forcefully dismissed by the government.

Building a startup forced me out of every comfort zone imaginable, but it also provided invaluable experiences, knowledge, tactics, and perspective into organizations, business, and teams. I have further improved as an organizational leader, listener, strategist, and product owner because of the experience with Mayo. The journey continues on as we look to introduce Mayo and a new form of interaction to many more communities to come.