When Stanford kicked us out for quarantine, it ripped a massive hole in my friendships. How isolating it is to text my friends to talk, one-by-one, and wait hours for a response.

Mission

To make the world less lonely when we're a part from friends.

About Sesame

<aside> 💡 We have an interview for Y-Combinator on Nov 30!

</aside>

Sesame is a “digital dorm” that makes hanging out seamless.

Problem: Knowing exactly when your friends are free and if they want to hang out (without texting them 30 times or disturbing them) is the key pain point when trying to spend time with friends.

Solution: A chrome extension that gives you a list of your friends, tells you if they're actually free or not, and lets you talk in 1 click.

It's still early, but among our TAMS high school cohort (314 users) we have...

• High engagement: Our average user participates in 4 calls a week while our super users participate in over 100 per week.
• Almost no churn: 97.79% 1 day retention. 98.11% 7 day retention
• Big impact: 35% of users would be very disappointed without Sesame. "I would lose the opportunity to speak to many of my new TAMS friends on a regular basis along with meeting many new TAMS people I wouldn't have met otherwise."
  • Use case: just chatting, study parties, physics lab sessions, Among Us game nights, or silently co-working side by side to Doja Cat.

Maddie Wang - Tech/Ideator

• Excited, gay, and hacky
• Built Sesame in 2 weeks
• Hates Zuckerberg. Impact > money

Startup Experience

• At 12, made Minecraft community & $61,000
• At 19, made Amazon e-commerce store & $120,000
• At 20, I ended the Amazon store in order to pursue community-driven work.

Made QueerChart for Stanford's queer community with over 220 users.

About you: Product & Growth Person

I'm looking for someone who can work with me to understand our users, help steer the direction, and employ a methodical approach to execute it together.

My Ideal Co-founder ❤️

• Personality
  • You care a lot about tackling loneliness. Endless passion about this space.
  • You're someone I can trust, and can trust to get things done on their own. You'll fight even when it's hard
  • You value impact over money
  • Organized / Data driven
  • Interviewing users excites you, not tires you
• Expertise
  • Interview a ton of users. You are user research
  • Worked a lot with metrics. N-Day retention, engagement, virality, etc. knows what to look for
  • Hella organized when it comes to understanding problems. Worked with hypothesis driven approach to developing products
  • Created user personas before
  • Really comfortable setting their own goals and executing extremely fast (eg: 20 interviews in a week)