Over the past year, our community has blossomed into one of the largest communities of international students on Instagram. At the same time, our website has become a hub for top-rated student services. Your feedback highlighted a need: converting our massive online community into tangible, meaningful connections.
We discovered that parents in India were independently sharing spreadsheets of student contact information and school affiliations to establish these connections and ensure safety. We can do better! By tapping into our online presence, we can take these networks to global scale!
Meet Roam Connect#
Roam Connect is our latest feature designed to bridge that gap. Now, students, parents, and alumni can effortlessly connect with peers from the same school, country, or major, fostering friendships and establishing emergency contacts abroad.
Key features#
- 🤝 Profile Matching
- Connect with individuals based on shared institutions, countries of origins, academic interests, or graduation/employment timelines. Parents can establish emergency contacts, and students can seek out potential roommates or advice.
- 🤖 New onboarding flow
- OK, we may have gotten carried away with AI. We've worked with users to simplify our onboarding process into a friendly, predictable form, ensuring a smooth start for new users.
- 👤 Refreshed profile page
- Editing your profile just became so much easier!
Avoiding the tar pit 🦖#
- As startups grow, they are constantly tempted by revolutionary ideas that seem promising at first but often struggle to gain traction—known as tarpit ideas.
- Travel planners, productivity tools, personal CRMs, and new social media platforms are examples of products that usually fail to find a market.
- At Roam, we chose not to recreate social media features like direct messaging and custom groups. Instead, we encourage users to socialize on their preferred platforms, such as Instagram, Snapchat, Whatsapp, etc.
- While social media giants focus on social features, Roam will continue to focus on its core mission—improving the immigration experience of our students.
What's next#
- At the time of writing, we have partnered with over 30 small and medium sized businesses. Navigating these choices can be overwhelming, which is why we're working on streamlining the process for new students to get started with Roam.
- Our improvements to support student agencies are in progress.
- With Roam users representing 37 countries on our site and so many more on Instagram, we're excited for what's to come. To all our readers, please send us feedback to let us know how we can help you!
Have a great day,
The Roam Team