Corall.co

The Social Layer for Shared Professional Spaces.

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Inspiration

Professional spaces like coworking and conference venues have always promised networking and connection. We long for that, but the right tools were never delivered.

For the coworking industry, startups in the past have lost traction due to misalignment of value and prioritizing real estate revenue streams (e.g. WeWork). We missed the opportunity to promote the social atmosphere that drove initial market engagement.

For conferences and events, the tools have always prioritized the hosts; ease of registration and event management. This causes us to tolerate retrofitting existing social platforms like Slack, Discord and Instagram, that aren’t made for one time events, where channels overwhelm and become buried, and where users are masked with online aliases.

For ourselves, we are guilty of being convinced that our time was worth it. That we will eventually follow up with that one guy on Linkedin. We fail to admit that so much depends on luck, that so many potential interactions we gave up on because of inconvenience in the moment. But we have the incentive to put ourselves out there to attend events and join communities seeking opportunities, and this itself creates a robust and self-driven user base. We can leverage the action of event registration to create the value that we deserve.

What it does

  • Corall is a unified platform that connect builders and venturers through a dual-profile system that leverages event registration and common professional spaces, to facilitate real-time discovery, and intent-based social design.
  • It places an equal emphasis on benefit for the host, the attendee, and their projects/journeys.
  • Opportunities, people in your network, are searchable and users can always connect them back to where they met, what they have in common and what they are working on. -Designed to be flexible for integrations and automations that make it effortless for users to follow through

How we built it

Using Next.Js, React, Tailwind, Typescript, Google OAuth and Supabase.

Challenges we ran into

Coral taps into several market segments that drive diverse and robust revenue streams, serving as the foundation for many market opportunities. However, this introduced the challenge of obtaining accurate and conservative data to gauge our market prospects.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

  • Completing a early-stage technical MVP in 36-hours alongside the main business pitch and market research deliverables.
  • Building it solo
  • Tapping into a niche market and identifying high-growth and scalable opportunities
  • Solving a problem personally witnessed and experienced

What we learned

The problem isn't connection. It's how we define connection. What we have now lacks continuity because it requires venturers and event attendees to take an extensive effort to realize the true potential of in-person interactions. I learned how to turn a meaningful idea into a viable business model, and what it takes to validate an idea backed with real data while considering holistic factors to frame user needs.

What's next for Corall.co

  • Full technical implementation and onboarding for host-partnerships
  • Complete features for AI-driven network searching
  • Outreach to over 130 coworking businesses in downtown Toronto for MVP launch and piloting.
  • Parternships with coworking groups in Toronto and Waterloo

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