Why we need a new professional network for our relationships (not contacts)

Today, an average professional has 500+ connections but very few relationships. We’re busy; have many business partners and close friends. As with any relationship, regular communication is critical for the health of the relationship. Relationships get stronger when we communicate and weaker when we don’t.

Managing relationships is hard

Current professional networks makes it easy to grow your network but provides very little help to maintain them. It’s our natural instinct to connect, right after the in-person meeting. However, without building relationships with these new connections they are quickly forgotten.

Tools like LinkedIn are tailored towards seasonal use cases like up-to-date public profile, job search, or finding prospects. Your newsfeed is full of political, animals, self-promotional, brain game and/or eye candy memes. This gets spammy very quickly and it’s no surprise that only a small percentage of the members regularly use such products.

A strong relationship needs regular communication and context is a good catalyst to create organic conversations. Without context, our communication tends to be on a need basis. And longer the gap in communication, weaker the relationship becomes.

We also tend to avoid need based conversations due to fear of rejection. The fear of you being forgotten by them or appearing more like “takers” vs “givers”. The lack of context, aka not be in the know is one of the main causes for transactional relationships. It’s hard to start a conversation without knowing what to talk about.

But relationships matters

For career progression, learning, growth and support.

Our mission: Empower every professional to have a strong network of relationships (not contacts)

Introducing Nucleus — Effortless relationship management

Maintaining relationships is hard. Keeping in touch requires reminders and time commitments to do regular communication. Moreover, the perceived value is seasonal (job search, introductions, “unknown”), so it is hard to invest time on it. What if we dropped the cost of maintaining relationships, such that it becomes a no brainer and everyone gets a healthy network of relationships.

Most professionals read news, articles, essays every day to stay informed and get inspired. We sometimes even save our favorites and occasionally share them to our respective communities. Reading is clearly a daily or weekly activity for most professionals. What if we made it easy to share your most inspiring reads from anywhere. This way, the links you share provides context to your network and help you re-connect with people that matters to you.

Meet Nucleus: A professional network to share your most inspiring reads

Professional relationships — The Nucleus way:

1. Follow interests, not people

The concept of following now exists in almost any network based platforms. However, following people breaks the “home feed” relevance because people have several interests but very few common interests between any two person.

I experienced this myself during election times, when most of the people I was following, started sharing content on politics. This made my feed irrelevant, and I had to unfollow a bunch of people. Hence, to keep the feed relevant, we decided to eliminate the following people functionality, instead you follow mutual interests curated by who and what matters to you.

Your network shares many things that doesn’t matter to you. Keep your feed relevant by following curated topics from people and get inspired.

2. The feed that focuses on your topics of interest

We believe quality supersedes quantity. Nucleus is a new professional network to share your most inspiring reads. And because it focuses on topics that matters to you, you get the best of the web on your favorite topics delivered to you. As more people join us in our mission, we hope to become one of your primary source to learn, share and get inspired.

With Nucleus, you’ll discover news, articles from topics and people that matters to you. Find your next read, stay informed and discover curated topics to stay productive.

3. Exchange thoughts with your network through private messaging

Public comments are good but seldom are insightful. Moreover, very few people write comments because of concerns on public perception, misunderstanding or even network visibility. This results in either generic responses like “great read, thanks for sharing” or no comments. The problem with this is, the people in an industry tend to have valuable insights. So we lose a lot when they are silenced.

Another downside of sharing thoughts publicly is that we lose the conversation they would have generated. Talking about ideas leads to more ideas. We need a place where we can speak our mind. Thus, we believe enabling private messaging creates more and authentic discussions than sharing publicly via comments.

The links shared by your network provides the context, so you can always start a conversation and catch up. Thus, the recipe to build and maintain relationships effortlessly is:

Context by Content -> Regular Conversations -> Stronger Relationships

We’re very excited to announce that we’re now sending beta invites. Everyone needs a strong network of relationships but not everyone has one.

You deserve a strong network and we’d love you to join us in our mission. Sign up at https://meetnucleus.com. Help spread the word by sharing or click the little heart below.

-Arun & Andrew