Tether
Joining people and organizations based on common interests.
The Background
I founded this company while I was studying Mechanical Engineering at the University of Texas at Austin. It started while I was taking a course-load that required me to spend a lot of time outside of class doing homework, and I found myself only spending time with people I had already known before going to University. I felt like I was missing a crucial part of the college experience, one where I would meet new people and pursue new and exciting things.
I was speaking with a friend of mine about the current state of my personal life, and how I had discovered difficulty in finding new organizations and clubs to join. At the time, and perhaps still to this day, the listing for organizations at UT Austin was a simple alphabetized list posted online. Many of the clubs, I found, had long been dissolved, or the contact emails and information had failed to be updated since their inception.
Then my friend said: “what if you made kind of a Tinder but for organizations and people?” and Tether was born
The Idea
“The best way to match people to communities is through mutual interests. While using Tether, users are presented with a list of organizations based on best fit. This fit is defined by the how many of the users’ interests correlate to the community, and how well they correlate with the interests of current members within said community. In doing so, we’re reflecting the idea that communities are not only defined by its values as a whole; the personality of a community is the aggregate personality of its members. Overall, this makes the discovery process simple and manageable for the user."
-Tether Value Proposition (2016)
The business idea was immediately appreciated by people we knew who were trying to recruit for their organizations, and we went about immediately looking for someone with slightly more web development experience, as neither of us has done more work with CS. The user experience as I envisioned it would be one where any user could simply visit the website, select general topics and themes that they would be the most interested in, and then be given a list of active organizations tailored to their interests. For example, a user might select: Co-Ed, Outdoors, Hiking, Casual and may be presented with organizations they didn’t know exited, like the UT Hammocking Club, or the UT Fly Fishing Club.
What I Learned
This was a very busy time in my life, I learned that there was no going halfway when creating a startup. My colleagues were talented, hardworking, and passionate about this idea that we were creating together. Furthermore, I learned that no one is going to tell you what you need to be doing, the work and priorities need to be communicated between all the parties. Lastly, I learned that I didn’t have time to be worried about public speaking, or presenting under high pressure scenarios.
Once we had a somewhat working MVP and value proposition, we ended up going through a friends and family funding round, and pitching our ideas to leaders of tech companies. I think they might have seen what we didn’t see at the time: that our inexperience was having us get ahead of ourselves. We had gone to a lawyer and legally had Tether set up as an S-Corp, we shared equity, we brought people on board… All before we had a working MVP.
I left the team a few months after we had gotten started, my recollection is that they were planning on dropping out of college to pursue the idea, and I was not interested in doing that. However, I left having done a lot, and learning a lot about myself. I had coordinated the branding, working with another student to create a brand image, logo (seen below), design language, etc. I talked to a lot of new people who were in organizations at UT, asking them about their experiences, and learning how to best bring people on board. I designed the UI, and worked with the developers we had working for us to ensure we had a clean interface and a simple flow through the website. I learned about the dedication required to be in a startup environment, and grew to love the lean and mean working environment.
Conclusions
I still believe in the idea of “Tether” although I might change the name if I were to ever pursue something like that again. I learned that I wanted to work somewhere where I knew we were working toward some greater good. In this case, it meant making it easier for students having some social difficulty to find a group of people with similar interests.
