Show HN: One-on-one.tech – I built a business networking website

Hi HN community!

I’m Dennis and happy to show my side project one-on-one.tech which I built over the last couple of months. It’s a website which helps professionals to improve business networking by having one-on-one meetings with other professionals who match their interests.

Problem:

I hate the traditional way of networking and I bet many of you too. Too often I found myself in networking situations with other people but couldn't get much value out of it. After thinking about it for quite some time I ended up with 3 reasons:

- Lack of common interests: Working as a technical person in a business department I usually have a counterpart who has completely different interests than me. Even though it is still nice to learn about other topics I couldn’t expand my network with people where I could benefit from (and the other way around).

- Approaching people can be awkward: This counts for real life situations as well for online situations. Do people actively network via Linkedin?

- Networking in groups: Often when I was in a networking situation, I was in a medium sized group of people with extremely unpersonal conversations.

Solution:

I actually started this project as a capstone project for learning purposes after a django course with no intention to build a real product. That's the way it is when you are bored during the pandemic so one year later I have the first working product ready which aims to solve the problems stated above. My website allows you to create so called “one-on-one” meetings. These one-on-ones are always related to specific topics so people get to meet like minded counterparts. Other users can then reach out to the one-on-one creator in order to organize a conversation like a virtual/ real coffee. No AI involved which creates matches for you. You decide. My main goal is to bring together the right people and raise the quality of networking.

Technical Implementation: I used Django as backend and HTML, CSS and Javascript as frontend (nothing fancy). I implemented a very basic Service Worker in order to provide a PWA. My website is hosted on Heroku.

Future:

After investing quite some time in this project I want to validate this idea in public in order to get feedback. My actual goal is to implement this in larger companies for networking between employees. I feel like there is great potential for this as the networking possibilities in large enterprises are very poor (Please challenge me on this assumption).

Tell me what you think about the idea & the product itself. Any feedback is highly appreciated!