Company History
From inception, our mission has always been to create a platform that enabled connection and collaboration within closed, trusted communities. We are filling a gap for groups of people who have something strong in common but don’t necessarily have each other’s email addresses or cell phone numbers and are usually not Facebook friends. These people don’t have an easy way to connect. We have stayed true to this mission. Using the Spare to Share platform (app and website) as a base, we can support any number of markets.
we saw an opportunity to provide immediate value to the coworking market. Coworking spaces naturally wanted their clients to be aware of resources to share. With invaluable counsel from one of our advisors (and our first major client) we enhanced our sharing product, creating a communication and engagement app for members of coworking spaces. This provided us with users, usage and revenue while allowing us to enhance our tech to support future markets.
We committed to this and pivoted our sales efforts from residential sharing to communication and collaboration within coworking spaces, branding ourselves as CoworkConnect.
In addition to our coworking business we also had a small student housing business under the PocketKnock brand. Our clients used our app to communicate with their students/residents and allow them to connect and engage with each other. Over the four years that we worked in student housing we supported properties in two distinct phases. First during the school year with residents attending local schools, and second during the summer. During summer our client partnered with large internship programs (Goldman Sachs, PWC, Accenture, etc.) to provide housing for their interns. We supported these internship communities each summer from the perspective of the student housing property. We quickly learned there was a giant untapped market if we went directly to the HR departments of the companies hiring interns.
In 2019 we begakn extensive market research to confirm that there was indeed an attractive market here.
We spoke with dozens of campus recruiters from companies with large internship programs and interviewed and surveyed over 100 interns. The results were overwhelming. Companies need a way to communicate and distribute information to their interns, and to provide them information about the program, key dates, standard documents, FAQs, and a directory of other interns in the cohort. They need this throughout the entire internship lifecycle, before, during and after the actual summer program. This is where the creation of InternConnect began. From here we can expand into other HR opportunities that our prospects are already inviting us to address. This includes the support of start groups, employee resource groups (ERG), diversity equity and inclusion (DE&I) initiatives, leadership programs, etc.