Hey Groovers,
We gathered as a team last week. It had been a few months since we were together in person. During our last meetup in March '23, we agreed to focus on making Groove more social and helping you better support each other.
Last week, we discussed some pretty exciting evolutions and direction that we hope is going to fundamentally shift how you experience Groove. This should allow us to bring Groove to many more people and set up each new Groover for success.
Learning from the last few months
Let's start with what we have learned in the last few months. We shifted the product to lean into social, launched the bulletin boards, and helped Groovers manage their tasks between Grooves with lists. We've been really honing in on what are the ways that we can deliver you all more value in your day-to-day and feel more connected as you journey through life together.
As we navigated where to focus next, we saw that there is a large group of potential Groovers that want to integrate Groove into their lives and aren't successful...the data showed that we hadn't done such a great job at making people's first Grooves as magical as we could, so we jumped into exploring why that is and figure out how we can help them.
Recent research
Tova led this research, had a number of conversations with new Groovers that have joined the community recently and some important themes emerged. Stuff that we had heard in the past and some new insights.
If you jump into Groove, find people that you want to spend time with (and vibe with), and build a habit around Grooving, it can profoundly impact your life. We see and hear, over and over again, how it changes people's lives.
More than anything, the clearest indicator for someone to become a "successful Groover" (they kept on Grooving and loved it) was that they had people they regularly loved Grooving with—people who care about them and their work.
These people are a combination of interesting, relevant people they met on Groove, knew were already on here, and friends they had brought on. Up until now, we haven't been doing a very good job at supporting this, but successful Groovers were finding ways to build this circle of familiar faces themselves. Orbits (our social model that we launched last fall) had made the place less noisy, created more safety, and paired up familiar faces more easily, but it hasn't been helpful in users being intentional about creating an environment that they are excited about, in a simple way. Especially in helping you curate that group of people you know...and should know through relevance.
Considering the emergence from the research that the value of connection, community, and social infrastructure are just as important as accountability and productivity, we need to get better at this and the next version of Groove will do that.
Shift from listening to building
Coming out of this team gathering, the research, and discussion, I'm excited to share that we are shifting into building a meaningful new version of Groove that we are all excited about based on your early usage and feedback.
We're reinventing how Groove shows up in your lives. Instead of it being you joining one great big co-working space, this is about you building your dream co-working space.
Groove will support you in making this as easy and low-lift as possible.
New social approach
The primary shift is that we're gonna shift the social structure from the orbits model, to a keycard model.
What's a keycard model?
Groove is going to give you control over who has access to your Grooves. Friends, friends of friends, people with shared interests, and people you think you'll vibe with in the wider community. You'll give those Groovers access to your Grooves by giving them a keycard. This will give you the backbone of your structure.
Alongside this, we will be overhauling discovery. Right now, it is hard for you to find other relevant and interesting Groovers and join them. We will do a lot to help you understand who else within the product is more relevant and make it really easy for you to bring your existing networks into the product from day one.
Since Groove started, we've built almost all of our features specifically through the lens of supporting current Groovers. These will be built through the lens of supporting someone brand new, but ultimately improve everyone's experience.
Current Groovers have voiced wanting more control over who they Groove with, their pain points with orbits and notifications, and a desire to more easily bring on friends/see which friends of theirs are already Grooving. These updates will address all of those concerns.
Importantly, for new Groovers we will simplify the experience and make it easy to discover and connect with relevant Groovers and hide some of the features built for more experienced Groovers.
Setting new Groovers up for success
When they get in, there will be a new onboarding flow (probably similar to the post-its below). Once new Groovers create their account and land on the homepage, they'll be given the option to start a "discovery Groove", a new kind of Groove that's not private or public, but is instead available to people you know already in Groove and relevant people you might love Grooving with based on what you've shared about yourself in the onboarding process.
Instead of the possibility of being matched up with anyone on Groove, new Groovers will have a soft landing into Grooving only with "people like me" and "people I know" through these discovery Grooves.
We are eager to make these early Grooves as magical and simple as possible.
What's coming down the line?
Over the coming weeks, a more detailed roadmap will come to life. Each of these post-its represents big areas of product development, including;
- Groover's workspaces
- Bring and find your friends
- Discovery - find relevant Grovers
- More context for relationships (how people in your space know other Groovers)
- Discovery Groove: Simplifying the way to meet new Groovers
- See who is online now
- New notifications system - less noisy and increased relevance
This isn't set in stone, we are moving to finalize designs and features... I'm excited to share more soon.
In our move to build publicly with Groovers, feel free to drop me an email or DM me on Twitter with feedback and reflections. I'd love to hear from you and happy to chat more.
Hopefully see you in the town hall tomorrow or in a Groove soon 🏄♀️
Josh
Ps. If you want to hear more about the ongoing thinking that goes into building Groove, check out the voicemails between me and Taylor here.