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Dashboard overview of active match programs and invitation links
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Match program creation page with current program parameters
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User page with employee list overview, field settings and active status
EUvsVirus Matchathon & Demo Day
First of all, hello! We are so grateful for the opportunity to present our project to all the corporations, governments and investors working together to hack our way to a better future. THANK YOU!
Below is an introduction to Lunsj, our product vision, current progress, product roadmap, use cases, and our goals for the matchathon and demo day. We look forward to meeting as many of you as possible in the near future!
Please don't hesitate to reach out if you want to learn more > > > kyle@lunsj.ai | https://www.lunsj.ai/
Lunsj in brief Lunsj helps organizations automate routine knowledge sharing and social connection
- B2B SaaS product in the category of HR and digital transformation; business continuity
- Business process automation platform facilitates routine knowledge sharing and social connection
- AI-driven, customizable match programs bring colleagues together for purpose-driven connection
- Match programs currently support random matching or the prioritization of new matches
- Lunsj uses existing company email, calendar and video chat software, no app download or learning curve
- Super simple to use for any employee, regardless of demographic or technical skill set
- Beta platform has 3 companies and over 300 users to date, with at least another 2/250 by June
- Appropriate for organizations, companies, governments, institutions; 50-10,000+ employees
- Use cases are numerous: please see the section below for a brief overview of what is possible with Lunsj
- Build more connected, more effective organizations while increasing innovation and employee retention
- We are a team of 2 best friends in Norway who met at a school hackathon almost 6 years ago!
The Lunsj platform
Introducing Lunsj
Lunsj is a business process automation platform that allows organizations to automate routine knowledge sharing and social connection through customizable matching programs.
The match programs are driven by algorithmic matchmaking (for likeness, difference, unique instance) and applied to organization-determined variables (custom fields, tags) and groups.
The Lunsj platform is designed to be both customizable and highly extensible, meaning it can easily be tailored to the unique needs of any organization while still providing value for generalized use cases.
Lunsj is a B2B SaaS product in the category of HR and digital transformation solutions. We are industry agnostic.
Product vision
Lunsj allows organizations to create automated match programs, bringing together employees in groups of 2 to 10 for regular, purpose-driven connection. Our platform will include third party calendar and video chat integrations with the tools your organization already uses. Best of all, Lunsj works independently of any existing company software.
For employees, there is no app to download, no software to learn, no new login to create -- if you use email, calendar and video chat, you can increase knowledge sharing and build social connection across your organization with our powerful match programs.
In the future, we will be creating a match program template library of Lunsj use cases to empower organizations to find new ways to grow closer using Lunsj. We will also create a content library of suggested conversation starters, workshop prompts, as well as expanding the customization options for organizations to communicate directly with employees via Lunsj match program emails.
Our grand vision with Lunsj is still forming itself, but here is a sneak peek: what if you could visualize, analyze and act on, in real time, the sum-total of all relationships across your organization? Would you choose to let that one business unit stay isolated? Would you increase knowledge sharing between management and new hires? Prioritize new types of match programs over others?
In the long term, the purpose of Lunsj becomes somewhat more clear: to empower organizations to grow together, so that we may all collaborate better and find solutions to the global challenges of our time.
Current progress
After only 4 weeks in development, the beta version of the Lunsj platform is already live and will begin testing with over 300 employees from across 3 countries and 5 time zones beginning next week!
The Lunsj beta currently supports routine matchmaking for groups of 2, 3 and 4 employees. Product admins can set the day(s) of the week, start time, default time zone, group size, match frequency, program repeat (# of instances/indefinite), and customize program-specific messages sent out to employees.
At time of writing, there are two template match programs available for product admins to choose from, including 1 on 1 coffee chats and 4 person digital lunch hangouts, as well as the option to create (unlimited!) custom match programs with the settings mentioned above.
We have worked hard to achieve full GDPR compliance in a short time.
Current user experience
For product admins -- For all of our pilot customers, we will personally help with all product onboarding. After account creation, product admins will be presented with our admin user interface containing X menu items: Dashboard, Match programs, Users, Organization and Settings.
- Dashboard provides an overview of actively running match programs and birds-eye statistics on total active users.
- Match programs is where product admins create customized connection routines to bring employees together
- Users is where you can upload users individually, in bulk, or by signup link, or edit or delete users
- Organization is where you can set organization-wide settings like HR contact, onboarding memos, and more
- Settings is where you can control organization-wide user data (download/delete)
For employees -- When users are added to the Lunsj platform, they will first need to provide their consent so that we can process their data - this is done by email and requires a single click. When a match program is created and activated within the Lunsj platform, employees receive an introduction to the program: its distinct purpose (or agenda) and program details (group size, frequency, et cetera). They will then receive an email with a shared calendar invitations before each scheduled match with their colleagues. The email will also include shorthand details about why and who they are meeting with. In the future, this invitation will also include a link to a dedicated, secure video chat platform for employees in different locations.
Product roadmap
We have come a long way in a month, but still have a lot on our list. The following items may not be developed in the order they appear, as we hope to prioritize our roadmap based on the needs of our pilot customers.
Here is a short overview of our plans:
- Build native third-party video chat integrations (with Microsoft Teams, Zoom, etc.)
- Build native third-party calendar integrations (Office 365, Google, etc.)
- Build a framework for the creation of custom user groups
- Build a framework for the creation of custom user fields and tags
- Expand our match program framework to accommodate custom match program logics
- Expand our matchmaking algorithm to accommodate groups up to 10
- Expand our matchmaking algorithm to enable dynamic matching (using tags and groups)
- Expand our matchmaking algorithm to match for likeness or diversity (based on tags and groups)
- Build native third-party video integrations with secure, no-login video conferencing providers (Twilio, Whereby)
- Create a match program template library to simplify user experience and enable the discovery of new use cases
- Create a match program content library with conversation starters and prompts
- Continually improve our customer's ability to customize the Lunsj platform
Who is Lunsj for?
Lunsj is ideal for:
- Companies, organizations, governments, institutions, non-profits -- if you work together with humans, we can help.
- Organizations with over 50 and up to 10,000+ or more employees; for teams, divisions or whole companies.
- Globally distributed organizations, semi- or fully remote teams, companies with multiple offices or divisions, etc.
- Got silos? Want encourage knowledge sharing? Improve social connection and cross-departmental cohesion?
- Essentially, Lunsj has countless use cases that only you, the customer, can dream up. Help us discover them!
Non-profits and NGOs: we are committed to providing Lunsj FOR FREE, FOREVER to non-profit organizations.
Potential use cases
While we have already identified numerous use cases, organizations will no doubt continue to discover their own!
- Connect socially isolated remote or distributed employees during/after covid-19
- Improve social connection within or across teams, divisions, geographies, whole organizations
- Automate workshops or standup meetings with static or dynamic groups of employees
- Foster company culture and facilitate smooth integrations post M&A or with new onboarding hires
- Bring two teams closer together (ex: sales and marketing) before and during a large initiative
- Break down silos, increase employee engagement and improve collective belonging among colleagues
Lunsj automates processes that would otherwise be impossible for HR teams to execute. At the same time, improving knowledge sharing and social connection has been demonstrated to increase innovation and employee wellbeing while reducing rates of attrition. All of this adds up to happier, more effective organization and many thousands of dollars saved.
Goals for the matchathon & demo day
Here are a few of our thoughts; if you have your own, please let us know!
- Meet and learn from companies, organizations, governments, institutions, etc. about their novel use cases
- Secure pilot customers (any org type above) that want to build connection across their organization
- Secure launch partners for the official product release, or who want to help co-develop the solution
- Meet investors who are interested in learning more about Lunsj
- Secure investment for our pre-seed round this summer
- Meet and learn from product/vertical-relevant industry experts
- Meet potential mentors and advisors who share our long term vision or want to join the team
- Meet potential future team members who are as excited about Lunsj as we are
What's next for Lunsj
May
- Participate in the EUvsVirus matchathon and (hopefully!) demo day
- Participate in the Startup Wise Guys accelerator demo day
- Increase rate of new pilot customer adoption, onboarding and use
- Meet potential investors, mentors, advisors and future team members
- Begin seeking seed investment
- Continue hustling, hacking and building a better tomorrow
June
- (Hopefully) get accepted into Y Combinator! (if you know someone there, let us know!)
- (But also) apply to the StartupLab Norwegian accelerator
- Increase outbound pilot customer sales/conversion
- Secure commitments to join our mentor/advisory board
- Continue seeking seed investment
- Continue hustling, hacking and building towards a better tomorrow
July
- (Hopefully) get accepted into the StartupLab Norwegian accelerator
- (But also) continue seeking seed investment
- Begin outbound customer sales in beachhead markets
- Begin prospective hiring for when investment closes
- Take a day or two off and enjoy the (short) Norwegian summer
- Continue hustling, hacking and building towards a better tomorrow
August
- (Hopefully) secure seed investment
- (But also) take a day or two off and enjoy the (tail end of) Norwegian summer
- Begin first hire interviews
- Continue hustling, hacking and building towards a better tomorrow
Thank you for visiting our Devpost page!
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Please see below for our original hackathon submission
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Hackathon Submission
We would like to thank all the mentors and judges who helped us come in at #2 for our track at the EUvsVirus hackathon -- we are so appreciative of your support!
If you would like to reach out and see how we are helping organizations build social connection and improve knowledge sharing, please email us at hello@lunsj.ai or visit us at lunsj.ai
Thank you! <3
1. The problem our project solves
In a world where millions will be working remotely for the foreseeable future, employees are struggling to maintain the social connections and knowledge sharing that research shows is critical for engagement, productivity and innovation. This problem is especially painful for older workers and those who struggle to use new technology. The need to address this problem and ensure employee and organizational wellbeing is enormous.
2. The solution we bring to the table
Why we are making Lunsj Our goal is to spark social connection at work, enabling organizations to become more inclusive, increase knowledge sharing and grow organizational culture.
What we are building (MVP) The Lunsj web app connects colleagues for weekly 2 and 4 person meetups, automatically inviting them to shared calendar events with a link to a secure video chat room (if in different locations or unable to meet in person). There is no need for individual scheduling or setup, and there is no app to download or software to learn — everyone can just grab Lunsj.
How it works (MVP) Every week, employees receive an opt-out email allowing them to inform us (and their team members!) that they are unable to be matched the following week. Then, employees will receive calendar invitations shared with their colleagues and containing a link to an optional video chat room. If they find out that they cannot attend, all they have to do is reply to let their colleagues know they won't make it. The Lunsj algorithm prioritizes new matches between team members, and will be expanded to enable custom matches based on user-defined tags such as location, role, department or personal interest.
Technical details (MVP) The tool consists of a statically hosted website on Netlify built with Vue.js and Nuxt.js. This website is a portal where admins can create organizations and create invite links to share with their users. Users who accept the invite link are guided on a fully GDRP compliant sign up journey with privacy by design integrated in all steps. Our backend runs on a server built with Node.js, express.js and nest.js that periodically matches active users in the organizations for 1 on 1 and 4-person meetups as pr the organization's settings. The matches are created as real calendar(iCal) events that are distributed to the participants by email via SendGrid. This is all hosted on Heroku. Data storage and authentication is handled with Google's Firebase service. This is all hosted in Europe, thus ensuring enterprise grade security in infrastructure, GDPR compliance and above-board authentication from the start.
3. What we did over the weekend
Data privacy & GDPR compliance: After consulting multiple domain experts on GDPR, we have drafted a preliminary privacy policy and cookie policy for our website and services. We have also implemented the ability for account admins to download all of their account data and to delete their account. We further added steps to confirm new users accounts according to GDPR compliance by integrating additional steps into the email user flow. We have yet to draft a Terms of Service for users or allow more granular contact and privacy settings, but these are now in our roadmap.
See the privacy agreement here: https://app.lunsj.ai/policy/privacy and cookie policy here: https://app.lunsj.ai/policy/cookies/ Going forward we have a roadmap and outlines of of additional GDPR-related documents to create and a wide network of legal experts to validate our approach.
List of additional documents outlined:
- Terms of Service
- Controller Data Processing Registry
- Data Protection Impact Assessment
- Data Processing agreements for organizations
- Data Processing agreements for users
Product validation and user testing: This weekend, we were fortunate enough to receive positive responses from two pilot customers who together have over 40 employees spread across multiple countries and time zones. They will be working directly with us to trial and improve the Lunsj platform over the coming weeks and months.
Starting Saturday morning we invited our fellow virus hackers to join a pan-European digital Lunsj. In addition, we have established a dedicated group account for all EUvsVirus hackathon participants. Our goal is to enable continuous sharing of experience, knowledge and support after the hackathon is over. As of Saturday midday, over 50 individual hackathon participants had already signed up.
We hope you will join our growing group of EU hackers for regular (bi-monthly) connection here: https://app.lunsj.ai/invite?organizationId=NhxcmBEry2rx5ioHWLf3x&linkId=OwwCgH5-GThcyl_fZ0mH5
Other progress: Utilizing help from experienced design mentors we managed to overhaul parts of the admin dashboard and had several conversations with site reliability experts from Google et. al. where we discussed how to get the company.lunsj.ai architecture (known as Multi-tenant), like slack uses, and how to deal with inevitable scaling problems.
4. The solution's impact to the crisis
Lunsj is impactful because it is simple and accessible, easy to implement and rapidly scalable. It is potentially as valuable to a high-tech organization of 100,000 employees as it is to a low-tech organization of 50.
Simple and accessible: Lunsj was first conceived out of a desire to create something accessible all employees, regardless of age, location or technological skill. This is why we only require knowledge of email and calendar to be able to take advantage of our solution — it might not be the absolute best way to address these problems, but we can impact the lives of many more people — so that we may grow inclusive social connection in organizations of all sizes.
Easy implementation: Equally important was the desire to make Lunsj simple to adopt. Organizations require only 1 user to log in to set user settings for the entire team, even if the organization has thousands of employees spread out across the globe. For everyone else, there is no app to download or software to learn.
Rapidly scalable: Lunsj relies on email and calendar and works regardless of the existing software/technology stack used by the organization. In addition, once the core product has been tested on a smaller (~100 person) organization, we can be certain that the fundamental components will work at scale regardless of how many customers we have or how many employees those customers have. This allows us to focus on building out additional feature sets that will provide value to organizations, rather than worrying about the growing pains of our technology architecture.
Impact for good: Lastly, we are committed to doing good, and we want our impact to be felt even by those without the budget to purchase our services. This is why we will offer all of Lunsj's features to not-for-profit organizations for free forever. In the future, we will determine how we may provide discounts to certain for-profit organizations, for example startups building solutions to the SDG's.
5. The necessities in order to continue the project
Both team members are currently unemployed and do not possess the savings to bootstrap the costs of our platform's data traffic, third-party software, additional team members or external advisory services.
In order to continue work on this project, a combination of soft financing (from this hackathon, other EU frameworks, Innovation Norway, angel investors) and/or hard financing (venture financing seed investment, other forms of convertible debt) is required to cover costs related to MVP development, pilot customer (learning) engagements and software-related operational overhead.
In addition, any and all advisory, mentorship, network introductions and/or directly applied expertise is critical in order to properly, effectively and rapidly implement and scale our solutions to those who need it most. This is especially true as we plan to provide Lunsj for free (forever) to not-for-profit organizations.
6. The value of your solution(s) after the crisis
Lunsj was designed to be a BEAN style intervention. This means it has to adhere to the following principles: Simple, Fun, Trackable, Practical, Reinforced, & Organizationally consistent.
In addition to these principals, meant to reinforce impactful habits and routines, we have created Lunsj to be equally valuable to companies post-crisis. While it is too soon to say how long the current remote work situation will last, or how office life will be affected in the future, one this is for certain: more employees will be working remotely either part- or full-time across all organizations globally. This is why we will be ensuring that our product is equally functional and valuable whether in the office or remote.
We believe that the value and importance of our solution will only increase as time goes on. The need for routine social connection and knowledge sharing at work will never disappear, but there is no telling how difficult it will be to maintain the routines and processes that enable this in the future. This is of core importance to our long-term mission.
7. The URL to the prototype Github, Website,...
8. The URL to the pitch video
Built With
- express.js
- firebase
- firestore
- gitlab
- heroku
- nest
- netlify
- nuxt
- tailwind
- typescript
- vue
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