Acquiring Users in a Room
Not a waitlist. Not an ad. A room.
On August 17th I’m speaking to the incoming class at Thunderbird School of Global Management.
I went through the program a few years ago. I liked it a lot, a mini United Nations. Getting invited back to talk to the new cohort feels surreal—and practical. It’s the first clean shot I’ve had to put mee.contact in front of people who are about to live the exact problem I’m building for.
Why students
Incoming Thunderbird students are about to exchange contacts constantly.
Classmates. Group projects. Club nights. Coffee chats. And then the harder lane: recruiters.
Peer-to-peer is usually easy. You’re both students. The stakes are social. A QR, a tap, a “text me”—nobody’s evaluating your career in that second.
Student → recruiter is different. You want to look sharp. You don’t want to fumble your phone, spell your email twice, or leave without a clean trail of who you met. The other person is busy. They’re sorting signal from noise. You’re trying to put your best foot forward in thirty seconds.
And on top of that, recruiters are okay with exchanging emails and collecting resumes, but they typically do not exchange phones whatsoever.
That’s the crowd I want trying the product for free first. Lots of hand-offs. But also to stress test the contact exchange from students to recruiters, to see how strong that barrier is. Feedback I can’t invent from my desk.
What I’m actually trying to get from that day
I’m not walking in to close paid accounts.
I want users that want to try something different. And the value prop to these students is to reduce friction.
If ten or fifty of them actually use it after the talk, that’s a win for this stage. A talk is theater unless someone leaves with the app on their phone and a reason to open it again.
I’m still figuring out the ask. Demo? Soft invite to a small beta? The details matter less than the intent: acquire users in person, or at the bare minimum trial the value prop where the pain shows up, instead of hoping strangers find a Substack post and convert themselves.
Where this could go later (not what I’m shipping for August)
Longer term, I keep coming back to the student ↔ recruiter side.
Imagine a student can share more than a phone number—a resume link tied to the same card, and a recruiter can attach that person to the event they met at. Catalog later without rebuilding the spreadsheet from memory.
That’s future vision. Not August. August is simpler: get the hand-off out of the way so the conversation can stay human. The resume/event catalog idea is me admitting where I think the product might grow if students and recruiters both get value.
In-person is the strategy right now
Online, I’m one more link in a feed.
In a room of incoming Thunderbirds, I’m a former student who showed up, with a product aimed at the next two years of their networking. That’s a different trust stack.
So this is the plan I’m writing down so I don’t chicken out: use the talk to get real users. Free. Small. Honest about what’s unfinished. Then learn whether classmates-only is enough—or whether the recruiter moment is where mee.contact actually has to earn its keep.
Recap
I’m Luciano Huapaya. I’m building mee.contact in public—an app to automate the contact exchange so you can stay present when you meet people.
Personas for what you share.
Connections for who you meet.
Events for where you met them.
Not on the App Store yet. This is the journal of getting there.