Last Saturday at Gnomedex, I opened the site up to all of North America. Noonhat is still most active in Seattle, but this week we’ve made the first lunch matches in other cities!
The good:
- It works! :)
- With all the recent publicity, many people in Seattle have signed up for lunches. (stats post coming soon)
- So far: three lunches in New York, three in San Francisco, and one each in Portland, San Jose, Los Angeles and Houston.
The bad:
- Most people who signed up outside of Seattle didn’t find a match on the date they picked.
So what happens when someone doesn’t get a match on the day they picked? They’ll get an email in the morning letting them know that Noonhat couldn’t find a match for them. Their registration automatically moves into a waiting mode, with an option to just cancel. Once someone else signs up for a lunch nearby, everyone in waiting mode will get an email with a link to follow if they want to have lunch on that date. If they can’t make it, they can just wait until the next email.
If you went on one of the non-Seattle lunches, how did it go?
August 18, 2007 at 1:01 pm
Why not have an option to set the date as multiple days. So if I have an hour lunch break everyday and can leave the office if I like, I could be scheduled for Monday’s indefinitely.
If there’s a match great! If not, no biggie, I’ll just wait until next Monday
August 19, 2007 at 2:14 am
Good call, Seth. At some point, I plan to add optional features like this for more frequent Noonhat users. But… not for a bit yet - I need to improve the back end a bit first and then make sure the default path goes as smoothly as possible.
August 20, 2007 at 11:36 pm
Hi Brian,
I tried out Noonhat in San Francisco last Friday. One person couldn’t make it, and the other didn’t get my email with a location until too late— and then I flew home to Seattle a couple days later. The funny thing is, each of them emailed me and said, “have you done this before?” And I always refer them to the Seattle PI article. It breaks the ice for them to see that I’ve done this and had a great time at it. Perhaps we should set up something similar (not everyone is going to have a PI story on their lunch), but create a Noonhat tag on Flickr so we start viewing what these lunches look like.
August 21, 2007 at 12:12 am
Sarah,
Good idea! I’d love it if people started taking photos of their lunches and tagging them with ‘noonhat’ on flickr! I guess that I should start, eh?
Also, as people send me feedback about how their lunches go, I’ve been asking if I could quote them (by first name) in a future testimonials section of the site. That’ll be nice, but it would probably be even better to have a list of links to people’s blogs where they’ve talked about their Noonhat lunch experience.
Take care,
-Brian
August 28, 2007 at 9:40 am
And if people are not comfortable taking photos of their lunch, at least take a pic of the food or the place where they have lunch ;)
Just a suggestion.
Rowena
August 30, 2007 at 1:19 pm
Hey Brian,
Had my first Noonhat lunch in NYC today. I wrote about it in my blog (http://metametta.blogspot.com), but in short, it was a lot of fun.
I’m on the waiting list in New Haven, we’ll see how it goes. But thanks for putting this together, it’s a great idea, especially for folks who are frequently traveling and just want to get together for some conversation in the afternoons.
September 1, 2007 at 11:13 pm
Have you considered sending the email contacts a day before the lunch instead of “that morning”? Along with Sarah’s example above, the “morning of the lunch” version can certainly be “too late” when using public transportation from suburbs to schedule a randomized weekend lunch at a more central spot. Initial contacts may of course not be with people sitting at their emails every moment, or able to continue replying within the last couple (or even few) hours beforehand.
It’s an interesting idea; some of us may just be wondering how workable it is for non-drivers who want a little random weekend lunch/brunch.
October 16, 2007 at 12:56 pm
Hi, I’m a senior citizen, live on a beautiful golf course-county club, lonely and looking for the ritht lady friend. Can you help me with that?
Ed.
October 16, 2007 at 12:57 pm
Looks promising, contact me. Ed
October 30, 2007 at 5:27 am
I noonhatted the a2b3 lunch every Thursday in Ann Arbor at Eastern Accents downtown.
Is there a noonhat feed? I’d love to see some kind of aggregation of where all of the lunches are.