This HCUBC writer sat down with Ajay Brach, one of the designers behind the up and coming social event app Meet Me There. Meet Me There is a platform that allows event promoters, venues, and artists to connect with their followers. When you follow them, it pushes all the following events by that user to your phone.
Once you accept an event, it will appear on you home screen and you can send an invitation to that event to anyone stored in your phone, via any messaging platform you’ve previously downloaded. The invitation sends as a URL, so whenever someone shares that same event link on Facebook, twitter, or other social media platforms, it takes the person who clicks it to the same event page within the Meet Me There app. This allows you to follow the creator of the event, so that you can receive information on all future events, should you choose to do so.
Other social media platforms such as Facebook are meant for event discovery, but there’s no way for an interested person to opt into every event because all the events are individual – you must be re-invited to each new event. Meet Me There is not trying to compete with your favourite social media sites; they want to be a compliment, to help discover organizations that you enjoy, rather than individual events.
Any event that you accept gets added to your master list, along with any class lists you can also choose to upload. From this list, you can swipe through all the other Meet Me There users that are also attending any of these events and classes. If you see someone that you’d like to talk to, you utilize your well-honed, tinderesqe skills and swipe to the right. If they similarly right-swipe on your picture, you can start a conversation before you meet up at the event you two have in common, therefore eliminating the need for awkward icebreakers.
The main goal of Meet Me There is to spark in-person conversations. By meeting on the app, you can move past the introductory stage, which they say is the hardest part of meeting people. Meet Me There allows you to meet more people online initially, so that once you attend the event or class you can get to know those people you share common interests with better and can develop a connection outside of the app.
Making the process on both sides simple, the Meet Me There app is for the users who follow the events, while the online site is for the users planning the events. Meet Me There hopes to help DJs, artists, and smaller organizations grow outside of Vancouver. The events from people you follow only get pushed to you if the event is within 150km of your location, so you won’t get spammed by events that you can’t attend. The web version of the app also allows the premium users to see where their followers are located, so they can tailor their events to best support their follower base.
The app includes lots of other great details. For example, the events stay live for a week after the event, so that if meet someone and forget to exchange information you can still contact them for up to a week after the event wraps up. You can also update your profile to reflect your interests in relation to the events that you’ll be attending, with categories for music, activities and others.
For the next little while, Meet Me There is focusing mostly on events and promoters in downtown Vancouver, but they hope to expand further to UBC classes and events when school restarts in the fall. Until then, if you’re interested in meeting new people and starting some cool conversations with people you’ll be bumping into at events this summer, be sure to download the app for Android on Google Play and for IOS at the App Store.