Noonhat

In honor of the chance to speak at Gnomedex, and even though there are still some rough edges, Noonhat is now serving the whole continent!

Happy lunching!

My talk was accepted, so I’ll be speaking about Noonhat at Ignite Seattle 4. I’m going to focus less on what Noonhat is, and more on how it came to be. Here’s the blurb for the talk:

Brian Dorsey - An embarrassment of riches - the story of Noonhat
We live in amazing times. Individuals and small groups can build small things with big effects. Even working part time.

Should be fun!

Update: The Noonhat video is online!

I’ve spent the last few weeks working on things behind the scenes. Originally, there were several things I had to do by hand each day to make sure the lunches happened. I even sent the email messages for the very first batch of lunches by hand! Now, the process is automatic, with just a pause for me to do a quick visual check before automatically sending out the match and match-failed emails.

Now that I’ve got more automation in place, it’s time to get the word out to as many people (near Seattle) as possible!

Things I’ve done so far:

• I’ve attended a few techie/startup events and told everyone I met about the site.
• I gave a five minute talk about the site, and the thinking around it at BizJam and Adobe onAIR.
• I posted a small ad on craigslist, in the activity partners section. I thought about putting it in the “strictly platonic” section of the personals, but maybe that’s not a good fit?

Things I’m planning to do soon:

• Create a logo.
• Make small signs to post on bulletin boards at coffee shops & restaurants.

Things I’d like help with:

• I’d love to get a note about Noonhat in the local papers, anyone know the right people?
• Probably should write a press release of some sort, but I don’t know the first thing about doing this well. Do you? ;)
• Ideas for other cheap/free ways to get the word out.
• Tell everyone you know about Noonhat! :)

Thanks for following along on the blog, and a huge thanks to everyone who has signed up so far!

It’s probably clear to anyone who has visited the noonhat site that I’m not much of a web designer. The initial version of the site had the map at the far bottom of the page. It wasn’t even visible without scrolling! I’ve made a few changes over the last few days which should make the site more interesting and a bit easier to use.

• Moved the map to the top of the page, and the email and date fields to the right of the map.
• Simplified the explanatory text.
• Added a text bubble in the map to explain the blue circle.

Before:

After:

The page is still quite plain, but I hope it’s better than before. Thanks to everyone who gave feedback on the first version! I’d love to hear what you think of the current layout, and how it could be improved.

I gave a short talk at Seattle BizJam a few weeks ago. I introduce Noonhat and rant a bit about thinking small, and how everyone you know is amazing.

Huge thanks to Bryan Zug who video taped the event! He’s just put the videos online. You can watch the Noonhat video right here:

Update: One thing I didn’t make especially clear in the talk is that one of the goals of Noonhat is to connect us with people outside of our normal social/work/hobby circles. It’s easy nowadays to filter down to match on particular interests, I want to help all of us open up a bit and have good conversations with a wide variety of people. Occasionally, even people we may disagree with!

Thanks to everyone who signed up this week!

On the 19th, our opening day, we had 15 people sign up for lunch and matched them in small groups of 2-3 people. Also, all of the sign ups were close enough to each other that I was able to match everyone with at least one person. I heard back from two of those groups, so I know that some people met, and had good conversations. Yea! Success!

Ironically, my own lunch didn’t actually happen. The default map location was centered over downtown, and the people in my group hadn’t noticed that the map needed to be moved and were actually too far away from downtown to make it for lunch. On the plus side, it’s very clear that I need to rework the front page to make it easier to understand at a glance. Until then, I moved the default location to the middle of the bay. That should make it easy to tell the difference between someone signing up for lunch downtown and someone who didn’t move the map at all. :)

After the first day, there was about one successful match per day. Each day there were a few people with no one else nearby. By default, I’m sending an email to let these people know and keeping their information active by default, so I can match them up once a few nearby people sign up.

I had my first successful lunch on Thursday. We met at a nearby sushi restaurant and had a fun rambling techie conversation. We’ve got a lot in common, I’m pretty sure we’ll stay in touch. Yea! Success!

Here’s the ironic part: One of my goals with Noonhat is to meet people outside my normal circles. On my first lunch, I meet someone who is also a programmer, likes and uses the same languages and frameworks as I do and works in a building on the next block. :)

As time goes on, I expect that we’ll end up with a wider and wider variety of people using the site. For now, I’m looking forward to lunches next week. I’m off to work on the site now.

The Name Inspector just posted an excellent article about deciding on a name for Noonhat.

Thanks again Name Inspector!