If you think about it, how many really strong connections do you have ? Quite a few, most of them being your friends and family. What ties you to them are common experiences, interests, and goals. Unfortunately, they are the result of chance putting you together in the same place and time, and of conversations or situations leading to the discovery of common interests.

Serendipity. This concept describes exactly what we are shooting for: a realization of an encounter that is so great, that it simply elevates you to the next level, and eliminates the need to look further. How many people that you know have achieved it ? Probably you can count them on the fingers on one hand. Do they seem to have a fuller life ? You bet ! Do you want to improve your changes of experiencing serendipity ? We have just the tool for you.

We designed this service to facilitate the discovery of most valuable people for you. You will have to do your part and ask people to use this service, to make themselves available for those who they click with. We will make sure that the procedure and the experience is clean, quick, and confidential, so that it minimizes the awkwardness and maximizes the results.

Don't get us wrong. LinkedIn is great. We use it. A lot.
But's it's LinkedIn. It has grown into a beast that follows you with their recruiters, with its data mining tools, and with the pressure of social norms. When you search, you find many people, very few of which might even consider the same things that you are searching for. You definitely need a more refined search tool, one that only exposes your interests to those with similar interests. And while it's great to have a wide exposure when you are searching, it is time consuming when you have to filter out those dead ends.

We designed Serendipify.Me to be an interests-based filter for your availability to be connected to others. It keeps out the riff-raff, and it gives you access only to those who really matter to you. For everything and everyone else, you have LinkedIn, Google, Facebook, etc.

Why do we send you out into the real world ? Going out shows that you have a serious investment in finding someone. It forces you to decide who you are targeting, and those involved have already passes the first "matching" test. It gives you an idea who are the people who you are targeting, and wha are at least some of their interests. All in all, a very useful pre-selection.

Serendipify.Me helps you dig beyond the surface, to extract the real valuable connection, to find amazing people for you. This is normally hard, because beyond a certain level of interaction, people are reluctant to reveal their most valuable interests. Our service is the confidential and convenient way for everybody to identify interests that defines their ideal connection.

The "pre-filtered group" is the perfect conduit for a quick and convenient way to identify valuable matches. Use it with your friends, colleagues, acquaintances from various social events and even on social networks (Meetups, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc). Strengthen those connections, get more out of your life !

We understand that people who land on our Serendipify.Me page out of the blue will be confused. What are those search spaces, or groups ? Are they Linked-In groups ? How will Serendipify.Me know who is in their group ? Well, search spaces are a transitory construct (they are only valid for 2 weeks) that define the scope of the search & match process. When you look for a partner for your serious endeavors, you are less likely to connect with a random piano teacher in Kentucky when you're a railway engineer in San Diego. Those "connections" are successfully achieved through dating sites, and Serendipify.Me is not a dating site. We are all about helping you narrow down (by filtering) to the right audience, which you build by inviting people to the search space, or group, that you have just created. And then within that controlled audience (that only grows by sharing the appropriate link) you know that whatever connections you get from having your interests matched against their, are going to be at the quality level that you expect.

So, do think hard who you're inviting to the group, and do make it clear to them what you and they expect from the matches in this group. And to ask them to forward to the right audience, outside your reach. This way, by filtering who gets invited in your search space, the results of the match will be much better than if the whole world was part of it.

If a user sets up a search, and broadcasts the group link to people, two weeks should be ample time for those invited to join and participate in the matching process. If invited people don't come, it's a clear sign that they don't belong, or want to be part of the endeavor that the user is attempting to set up. If there is time left, the initiating user should a) change or reemphasize the call to join the group or b) expand the group towards other potential match partners.

Too constraining ? Yes, but not that much. In the future, we will allow our users more flexibility with their search spaces (for a nominal fee...). For now we think two weeks are more than enough for searches to bear fruits. Please let us know what you think by emailing us at help@serendipify.me

• A-M employed a standard marketing and advertising campaign (Life is short. Have an affair) to grow their user base and equivalently grow the matching market liquidity. While this is what is normally done with a marketing budget, it did not work very well at A-M because of moral and social "risk" perception. Participation in A-M was a direct admission of a "moral guilt", which kept away the more risk-averse population (mainly women) from participating.
• A-M generated fake profiles to increase the participation (and the experience) in the network. However, this is misleading users about the market's quality, by way of reporting a higher number of matches (equivalent to financial "trading volume") in the market when they should have reported user availability (or the financial equivalent "open interest"). This same phenomenon happens in the financial markets as HFT (High Frequency Trading) companies "make the markets/provide liquidity" -- they use limited budgets (relatively low open interest) to generate high trading volume.

We at Serendipify.Me have approached market design (and market liquidity problem) in a different fashion. We avoid the market risk by having every user bring their own "financial instruments", by way of creating groups of people that users are familiar with, which translates into lower risk when matching. For the second point, our "bring your own liquidity" (BYOL) strategy and the matching of that liquidity in isolation (in a group) removes the volume vs open interest gimmick, giving our users better matches.

What is the lesson here ? Other than the fact that you should be constantly looking for people who enable you to achieve something great (arguably not A-M's target), you should realize that this process requires your direct involvement: It's not a simple match against any "stock" liquidity, it's a search that you conduct within a selected candidate group that you network with, and which you bring to our matching service. This is exactly how executive search firms do it, and this is how you should be doing it yourself. Serendipify.me is your commodity executive search engine, so go ahead and use it. Batteries (liquidity) not included :).