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Updated January 28, 2020When I move cities Twitter is the best way to make new friends. A tweet leads to a couple hundred meetings. So it solves the loneliness problem for me.Sahil Lavingia (@shl), founder and CEO, Gumroad*
These meetings are with people you’ve had repeated interactions with online over tweets or DMs and who you’re very familiar with. Don’t be afraid to initiate these 1:1 interactions and suggest a casual meeting over coffee or invite them to an event you’re already attending! This can also be a good practice when you’re traveling to a new city. Reaching out to people to move from online to offline can be daunting, and starting with online friends can help break the ice.
Sometimes people reach out to me, sometimes I reach out to them. Usually we already have a pretty consistent basis of mutual interaction online—we follow each other, we like each other’s tweets, we’ve replied to each other. A lot of the people from IRL Society are from Twitter.Jackie Luo (@jackiehluo), software engineer, Square
If there’s a small or large web of people you find yourself interacting with, and who interact with one another, suggest a meetup.
The great part of the platform is you can have banter with people you know have similar interests before you move to the private DMs. This makes the transition much more natural. I usually will reach out after a few back-and-forths on something on the platform, DM them and say I think they have interesting thoughts on X topic we bantered about, and if they’d be open to chatting more over a coffee. This has an incredibly high success rate and has helped me more professionally and personally than anything else in my life.Nikhil Krishnan (@nikillinit), Strategic Partnerships Manager, TrialSpark*
Seek out and message people who are playing infinite games and whom you can envision working with long-term.
Danielle Morrill (GM, Melato @ GitLab) and Andy Sparks (Co-Founder and CEO, Holloway), previously founded Mattermark together as a result of meeting online.