The Technique had an opportunity to virtually sit down and interview the co-founders of the new matchmaking platform brought to campus, meetGT.
After almost two years of the pandemic, the ability to make connections has become more important than ever.
meetGT is a platform which aims to provide a mechanism for Tech students to find matches. Matches can be romantic or platonic and share common interests, values and personal qualities.
The platform uses a personality algorithm to find the most compatible matches and then brings them together. meetGT’s team has three members.
Brandon Su is a fourth-year CMPE major and co-founder of meetGT. Su is also the technical lead.
Arjun Lahoti is also a fourth-year CMPE major, co-founder of meetGT and front end lead. Matthew Landis is a second-year CS major and helps with the cloud computing side of the platform.
“Essentially, meetGT is a project built by Georgia Tech students for Georgia Tech students. It is a running website that matches Yellow Jackets with other Yellow Jackets.
“Matches are sent out every two weeks with an algorithm that compares your interests and answers to the personality test and tries to find your most compatible match,” Su said.
For students who are interested in getting started, they can go to meet-gt.com and take a personality quiz, which measures various categories ranging from being extroverted to liking fitness or art.
“The algorithm will create a score based on how you answer,” Lahoti said. “Then you are prompted to enter a password and create an account. Your first match will be sent out by email and through your login on the website.”
The founders of meetGT made sure that the quiz was able to reflect a person’s personality. Even further, they make a step to incorporate how frequently the students wish to socialize with their matches.
“We made questions that would help us judge the kind of person you are. Some questions are meant to be specifically fun for Tech students,” Landis said. “We also wanted the quiz to be able to gauge how much time the individual is interested in dedicating to meeting their matches [and] if they are looking for a more social aspect of meeting people face to face or virtually. We work to keep track of what personality categories people are closest in and put that in the email when we send them their match.”
The Technique had an opportunity to virtually sit down and interview the co-founders of the new matchmaking platform brought to campus, meetGT.
After almost two years of the pandemic, the ability to make connections has become more important than ever.
meetGT is a platform which aims to provide a mechanism for Tech students to find matches. Matches can be romantic or platonic and share common interests, values and personal qualities.
The platform uses a personality algorithm to find the most compatible matches and then brings them together. meetGT’s team has three members.
Brandon Su is a fourth-year CMPE major and co-founder of meetGT. Su is also the technical lead.
Arjun Lahoti is also a fourth-year CMPE major, co-founder of meetGT and front end lead. Matthew Landis is a second-year CS major and helps with the cloud computing side of the platform.
“Essentially, meetGT is a project built by Georgia Tech students for Georgia Tech students. It is a running website that matches Yellow Jackets with other Yellow Jackets.
“Matches are sent out every two weeks with an algorithm that compares your interests and answers to the personality test and tries to find your most compatible match,” Su said.
For students who are interested in getting started, they can go to meet-gt.com and take a personality quiz, which measures various categories ranging from being extroverted to liking fitness or art.
“The algorithm will create a score based on how you answer,” Lahoti said. “Then you are prompted to enter a password and create an account. Your first match will be sent out by email and through your login on the website.”
The founders of meetGT made sure that the quiz was able to reflect a person’s personality. Even further, they make a step to incorporate how frequently the students wish to socialize with their matches.
“We made questions that would help us judge the kind of person you are. Some questions are meant to be specifically fun for Tech students,” Landis said. “We also wanted the quiz to be able to gauge how much time the individual is interested in dedicating to meeting their matches [and] if they are looking for a more social aspect of meeting people face to face or virtually. We work to keep track of what personality categories people are closest in and put that in the email when we send them their match.”
Providing information about why two people are matched in the email can help start the first conversation.
“Our focus for the creation of this platform is to get each user an accurate match,” Lahoti said. “We want your match to be a great fit for you, and with more users going through the personality quiz, we are able to increasingly do so at an accurate rate.”
The idea for starting meetGT was a combination of numerous factors.
Lahoti has been interested in app development for a while and started with phone games. The biggest thing that inspired Lahoti, Su and Landis to get together and create the platform was ultimately the shared issue they faced: falling out of touch with friends from campus. Once they realized that this was something they could try and help solve, the idea immediately came to create a matching service.
“Students want to meet more people, and what better way to do this than through matchmaking,” Su said.
Lahoti and Su had just finished taking a cloud computing class and wanted to make a project together. Over this past winter break, Su saw Landis working on a few intriguing projects and was inspired to ask him to help with the production of meetGT.
“The main joy of this experience has been being able to create a successful app and leaning into what we all are good at,” Landis said.
Su also mentioned that the COVID-19 pandemic completely changed how a college campus works and how social interactions occur. It has been hard for many students to meet new friends and other people in class due to the pandemic’s restrictions.
Su, Lahoti and Landis believe that meetGT is a solution to this problem.
meetGT’s focus has been to create a forum where people feel comfortable to meet new people.
The numbers are already showing how popular meetGT has been among the student body.
“We are pleased to say that as of this morning, Feb. 5, 2022, we have 1,073 users,” Su said.
That is over 1000 users in just three weeks of launching their website. The team has been pleasantly surprised by their turnout rate.
Currently, their platform is in the grassroots phase without much of a marketing budget, although they are open to expanding and growing into startup incubators. Thus far, Su has overseen meetGT’s Instagram account. He posts updates of how many users have signed up on their platform. The Instagram handle is @meet_gt_official, and it has been growing well over the last couple of weeks.
Landis has also made a thread under the Tech subreddit to help with advertising. As students walk around campus, they can see a few spots on the sidewalk where “meet-GT.com” is chalked.
Although meetGT could be easily characterized as a matchmaking service, its founders have been very intentional about ensuring it supports platonic matches too.
“For us, the most important thing is for our platform to be able to help users find like-minded individuals,” Landis said. “Through customer discovery, we found that users wanted to know whether it was going to be a platonic versus romantic experience when they met their match. This distinction also helped tremendously with safety.”
By allowing for both kinds of matches, the platform can be inclusive of the entire Tech community. meetGT uses two separate algorithms — one for platonic and one for romantic matches.
“Since we just launched about three weeks ago, we haven’t heard back from all our users just yet. We are planning to send out a survey to be able to see what people think of their matches. We are excited to get to hear their stories and learn about their experiences thus far,” Lahoti said.
“We have had some people reach out and tell us that they went out for coffee or something with their matches and were looking forward to staying connected with their match. We also want to use the results of whether people liked their matches or not to help further improve our matching algorithms.”
One of the constructive feedback comments the founders of meetGT have received is allowing users to be able to see a photo of the person they have been matched with.
“We would like to expand it to where there is a more personalized profile. One point we received from user feedback is that the users wanted to know what their matches looked like prior to meeting with them,” Lahoti said. “We want to create a profile card portion of the platform where you can add in a picture of yourself. We are continuously learning and taking in commentary from our users to try and improve our platform. We are also trying to increase the security on our platform as well as cater our platform to the needs of our customers and the market.”
The platform has potential to expand and grow through utilizing additional forms of technology. meetGT wants to integrate their current website into an app so there is even easier access to the platform through the user’s phone.
“Our next step that we hope to work on is creating a mobile platform for meetGT. A mobile app would help us expand our services,” Su said.
Additional future plans include expanding the app to other college campuses, as well as event-based matching.
“We are trying to expand our matching service to where users can choose an event on campus, like a Tech basketball game, and if they want to have people there with them, then they can use our service to find matches,” Su said. “Event based matching would allow us to help further drive user interaction. We are also working on a partnership with Miracle @ GT.”
Miracle @ GT is an on-campus organization supporting Children’s Healthcare Miracle Network with fundraisers such as its annual Dance Marathon event. meetGT’s partnership with Miracle @ GT will allow members to complete an event-based matching survey for the Dance Marathon in the spring. Afterwards, members will receive a miracle match to attend the event with.
Ultimately, meetGT’s main goal is to help foster great connections between Tech students.
“It has been really great having people come up to you and see how they made successful connections through using the platform,” Su said.