A Reader Reviews Networking Tool Letslunch.com

Posted on June 30th, 2011 by Keith Ferrazzi

Ada Chen Rekhi is head of user growth for Connected, which provides contact management without the work for busy professionals. She can be found on Twitter at @adachen and also writes about productivity and networking at Connected Life. -KF

ADA'S REVIEW:

Inspired by Sara Grace's earlier post about Let's Lunch and Let's Do Lunch, I gave Let's Lunch a go for a week, and shared my experience.

First of all, what is Let's Lunch?

Let's Lunch is a service which helps busy professionals network with one another. Currently they are only available in San Francisco, Silicon Valley and New York. You tell them when you're available and what type of people you'd like to meet with, and Let's Lunch does the rest.

Signing up for Let's Lunch is painless

The signup process for Let's Lunch was easy as soon as you get accepted. You start by submitting an application to join. While it was a little strange to wait, I'm assuming that they are doing good things by having a human on the other side confirm that my profile is yet another human.

They sent me an email to confirm, and made it very easy for me to set up my account by connecting my LinkedIn profile and typing in my Twitter user name. Then I selected a geographic area that I could have lunch in, and a checked off some interest areas.

All of this took me less than 30 seconds. So far so good, Let's Lunch team.

Taking the dive with scheduling lunch

To really try out Let's Lunch, I decided to take the dive and schedule three lunches for the week.

I set up my calendar for lunch on Monday, Wednesday and Friday in downtown San Francisco for the following week.

This is where the experience really began to deteriorate. On Saturday, they emailed me to tell me there wasn't a lunch partner available on Monday. The lunch alert emails also included the reason and claim, "We could not find a match this time, but try again, our match rate is above 90%".

By Monday, despite the 90% match rate claim, I was batting 0 for 2 on lunches available in my area.

Then on Wednesday... score! I finally had a Friday lunch scheduled!

My Let's Lunch lunch experience

Let's Lunch sends an email to each of the lunch partners and asks them to accept and confirm a time. The first to confirm also gets to choose a location, and optionally send any messages they need to coordinate.

They are pretty good about trying to make sure that each of the potential partners can maintain privacy around their contact information unless they actually want to share it.

I had a very mixed experience, however. The original person that matched cancelled, and I got a last-minute message the day before that my meeting had been switched to a different person named Igor. I showed up to our lunch venue -- a creperie -- and it turned out that the business was no longer open.

Igor and I did manage to meet and enjoy lunch together. We had a great conversation and it turned out that we even knew a few folks in common. I walked out of it having learned something new, and was even able to make some intros for Igor for potential new business.

All in all, despite a few hiccups, Let's Lunch came through.

Conclusion: Let's Lunch has promise

The premise of Let's Lunch solves a real problem by busy professionals meet and connect with each other. It's hard enough to meet and schedule with people whom we do know, but they've made it very easy to schedule meetings and actively meet new people. After all, like Keith Ferazzi says, you should never eat alone.

Their product is still pretty early and could use some work. Despite the density of contacts in San Francisco, I was only able to schedule one lunch out of three. It would have been helpful to get some indication of how I can increase my chances of a match, whether it's by selecting additional interest areas, expanding my geographic location, or simply helping me decide which days and times are most popular.

All in all, however, lunch with Igor was great and it was thanks to Let's Lunch. If you’re in San Francisco or New York, I’d say try it – it’s easy to use and you have to eat anyway.

Would you give Let's Lunch a try?

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