While relationships are what build your business, it can be tough to create new ones. Existing social apps out there for business owners are muddled with recruitment offerings, full of paid-premium spots, and crowded with noise and spam. The OPEN Forum app strips all that away, so users can spark meaningful conversations with people in their industry and find others with specific skill sets. It’s the quality of relationships that matter, and OPEN Forum helps you make more of them faster.

The OPEN Forum app also unlocks networking opportunities. Users can discover new conferences, trade shows, and meetups. Or, if they already know where they want to go, the app connects users to other attendees ahead of time so everyone can make the most of the event.

The new OPEN Forum app solves three key challenges for small business owners:

Save Time: Business owners are some of the most time-starved individuals out there. This makes them one of the most challenging demographics to engage. We solved this by providing an engagement tool that leverages existing behaviors. Business owners are already in the networking mindset while at events, so we built a tool they could use to maximize the time they spend at events.

Make an intro: Business owners need a lot of information about another individual to either vet them as a potentially lucrative contact, or to plan out their approach to make a meaningful first impression. We built our user profiles with the aim of being easy enough to create, but offer enough information for a meaningful first connection.

Protect their information: Business owners need a way to make that first contact, but because they’re highly sought after individuals, they aren’t always comfortable broadcasting their personal information. We built an in-app 1-1 real time messaging platform that enables business owners to make the first connection, assess the opportunity, and then take new connections into more conventional communication channels like face-to-face, phone call, or email.

In the first 3 months since launch, the app has driven 30,000 installs and has an active, growing community of over 5,000 business owners using the app to connect on a daily basis.