How to Create Meaningful Hyperlocal Relationships - Dan Street

How to Create Meaningful Hyperlocal Relationships - Dan Street Erik Michielsen: Base on your research, what have you learned about actual needs versus perceived needs in shaping communities? Dan Street: Before I've started this business, which I'm doing butter and sugar, I've spent about a year doing research, and I went out and talk to people in local neighborhoods. I talk to stay-at-home moms, I talked to community organizers, I talked to a bunch of different people. And one of the things that came out is everyone has a different complaint and a different problem, and a different need. And for awhile that paralyzed me, so you talk to a stay-at-home mom and her biggest concern is, I can't find play dates; I can't find good baby sitters; I can't find trusted people who are going to help fix my car, very tactical things that are real problems, real needs. And you'll talk to someone else who’s a real community activist, and their problem is engagement, they’ll say, “Yeah, I mean I've got a thousand things that I could go do, a thousand really cool things I can go do.” The problem is I can't get anyone to come help me. Because that’s completely different need. Then you'll talk to somebody else who’s a busy professional who travels. And they’ll come tell you, “Yeah, my biggest problem is I want my local area to be important, but I don’t have time to engage and I'm always on the road and there's got to be an easier way than what how the road is structured.” So those were the needs they said and professed. I took a step back and thought how I could make all these coalesce and go together. The biggest thing for me was that there was this underlying need for people to be connected in their local area, easily and simple and what I mean by that is that there's probably two questions there's how do I define organizing and how do I go out and get the people to join me? And from a person who is sort of more passive, how do I find out these opportunities and how do we make it easy for them to engage? And so for me, that was sort of the true theme, the true line between all these interviews, which was how do you make it easy to engage, because our lives are just so complicated and so difficult, it just can't be hard, I can't spend two hours trying to figure out how do we engage, it's going to come to me. Erik Michielsen: And how is it different then with what you’ve done than say meetup.org? Dan Street: Meetup is a great service. And I think there's a fundamentally different in the way that it's structured, so Meetup is around interest groups. So you like books, you like movies, you like hiking and that’s one type of bond, that’s an interest bond. And another type of bond maybe a co-worker bond; another type of bond might be a friend, a true friend, which you go out and go bowling with her, whatever you do. But a neighbor, somebody local is a different type of relationship. I don’t want to say it's weaker, and that you're aren't going to go ahead and start to have a beer with this person. But on the other hand, there's a real business to it. This is someone who sees you mowing your lawn in shorts. This is someone who knows your dog barks all the time which annoys you and annoys them. And things that are common, maybe there's a neighbor down the street who’s just crazy. I mean this is something that you can bond over and you have in common, that is real and matters, it's really two different type of bond, and our take is we’re just trying to just improve these local bonds, these local connections.