Curated Connections vs. Intros.ai

On the surface, both Intros.ai and Curated Connections are created to help community builders provide networking opportunities for their members.

But Curated Connections isn’t simply an alternative to Intros.ai.

Even though both these products were created to solve the same problem, there are some core philosophical differences them that ends up creating a drastically different experience for your community.

So you need to put yourself in your member’s shoes to decide which product will work best for your community.

Opt-out by default

When you create a networking program with Intros, your members will get opted out of the program every week by default.

Yes.

Each week, they will receive an email that looks something like this:

They will need to click on the “I’m In” button to receive a new introduction.

Now try putting yourself in your member’s shoes. Will you appreciate being given this choice every week or will you get annoyed and start ignoring these emails?

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Curated Connections on the other hand, asks every member how frequently they want to receive new matches at the time of signup. Then, it keeps sending the matches at that frequency until they change that preference or opt-out.

Both of which are easy to do at the click of the link that’s included with every match email that gets sent.

Best tool for the job

Intros requires all your community members to use Intros' calendar scheduling and meetings software. This may be good for Intros (more features to justify their B2B pricing) or for you (maybe you can use the data on exact minutes your members met to make a business case, somehow).

But is it good for your members?

In our product research, we discovered that professionals prefer to use robust tools that they used every day for the rest of their meetings - like Calendly and Zoom.

That's why Curated Connections allows your members to use their Calendly links (or anything similar) to schedule meetings with other members. Thus, reducing friction and increasing the success rate of a connection.

Scheduling headaches

Intros requires every member who joins to set up their availabilities on Intros calendar software. This is used to automatically suggest meeting times to the people being matched which they claim helps in improving the success rates of your program.

But this is exactly where the scheduling nightmare begins. Put yourself in the shoes of your members and imagine this scenario:

• You sign up for the Intros program and set 11am - 1pm on Tuesdays and Thursdays as your availability because that’s when you generally do random coffee chats.
• But a few weeks later, your workload increases and you are only able to block 11am - 12pm on Tuesdays for networking calls.
• So, you change this on your Calendly link that you use to send meeting times for random coffee chats. But you forget to sign into your Intros account and update that calendar.
• And now you start receiving matches for 12pm on Thursdays - the time you’ve set up for client calls.

How annoyed will you be? How many of these networking calls will you attend? How many weeks will it be before you unsubscribe?

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Curated Connections, on the other hand, gives your members complete control over their scheduling. It makes amazing introductions between your members and allows them to share their calendar scheduling links.

Many community builders have seen that this is what works best for busy professionals who get on multiple networking calls in a month.

You vs. enterprise clients

Intros sells its software to enterprise clients. This is one of its key markets that allows it to justify VC-level valuations.

That’s good for you if you’re one of their enterprise customers. But if you’re a not, be prepared to compete for their attention with the other customers who are paying them thousands of dollars. Whether you have a support request or a product request, you will be prioritised against another those coming from these big accounts.

Whose requests do you think will get prioritised?

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Curated Connections, on the other hand, targets indie communities and small startups. We’re a bootstrapped business where our only goal is to serve this market and charge them a fair price. In fact, no one can pay us more than $29 a month!

With this model, all our customers become equally important to us. Not being on a VC treadmill, allows us to show a level of care and affection that makes us happy. When you send us an email, you will hear back from one of the founders who are eager to get on a call to really understand your needs.

Other features

• Slack integration - Unlike Intros, Curated Connections comes with a Slack integration. So if you use Slack as your community platform, you can send matches to your members on your Slack itself.
• Simpler UI - If you’ve tried setting up a program on Intros, you know how complicated it is even after the 20 tutorials included on the dashboard. Curated Connections has an intuitive UI that works like a simple form builder. In fact, it takes less than 5 minutes for you to set up your program using Curated Connections.
• Pricing - Finally, Curated Connections is proud of offering all of these features for an easy to justify price of $29/month, which gives you access to unlimited members. Intros on the other hand, starts at $199/month that allows you to add a maximum of 100 members.