About Pair Up
Pair Up is a place for creatives — of any kind — to discover, arrange and meet like-minded people online for short-term advice, problem solving or learning in a non-hierarchical environment.
The platform is open to anyone, no matter your job title, age, location or gender. Our objectives were to make the kind of mentorship and advice the few get open to the many. To make mentorship more accessible — based not on location, experience or how much money you have access to — but instead easily accessible, online and free.
Pair Up is free to use for all. We may occasionally partner with like-minded brands or businesses to help keep the lights on and make sure we can give the app the love and attention it needs.
You can read an old article on It's Nice That about Pair Up or you can listen to this audio interview from 2020 with Mills from ustwo about the origins.
Community guidelines
We want Pair Up to feel safe, welcoming and to create a community that supports one another. In order to do this, we have strict guidelines for engaging with the community. Any individual found to be in violation these guidelines will result in a full ban, forever.
As we're a very small team, we're very reliant on you, the community, to help look after each other and report anything you feel may go against the spirit of Pair Up. You can contact us any time on our support email and we will investigate, as well as through the report function in the app.
1. Support each other
This is a space for people to give and recieve support from the community, for free, on their own time. It is not a place to belittle, make-fun-of or ridicule any individual or their work.
We are here to lift each other up, not tear each other down.
2. Be respectful
Everyone in this world is busy, and if they're on Pair Up, they have chosen to offer their time for the benefit of others. Be respectful of this. If someone is unable to Pair with you, or doesn't want to, it's OK!
If you have booked in a session with someone and you don't turn up, or you turn up late without letting them know, or you're rude on the call — it's not fair on the wider community that you may give the person on the receiving a bad experience of the platform.
3. Don't be a lemon
Any reports of abusive, rude or inappropriate language or behaviour will result in your account being suspended whilst our team investigate. If we find evidence to support the ban, your account will be terminated and your details banned for further use, forever.
Feature roadmap
This is a breakdown of some of the features we're thinking about, as well as new ones suggested by the community. We will work on ones that have the most community demand, or we see as having the most benefit to the product in terms of user experience.
You can comment on features here on Notion and suggest features here.
- “Give Thanks” to users
- Group Chats
- Enable videos in Broadcasts
- Allow multiple images in Broadcasts
- Booking of Slots via Platform
- Easy GIFs in Messages
- “Looking For…” Feed
- Filter Pairers by Location
- Directly attach files in messages
- Allow user deletion of Broadcasts
- Detailed “How-to” Guide
- Improved First Time Onboarding Flow
- Use markdown in messaging
- Report Users
- Account Hygiene (reset password, log out, hide availability)
- Basic Email Notifications
- Filter Pairers
- Request, Accept & Reject Pairing Sessions
- Message other users in realtime
- Personal Detail Creation (Experience, Education, Interests, Links)
- Sign Up & Account Creation
Funding & Costs
Pair Up is built by the community, for the community.
We don't have stakeholders or investors to answer to and our incentive is to build the best possible platform for each other. We've supplied a breakdown of the costs to run the app below.
Our approximate monthly costs, excluding development, are:
£68
To date, we've put a lot of time, energy and love into the product to build it.
This is through different iterations (this is version 4, versions 2 & 3 are floating in the atmosphere...), comissioning various designers to collaborate with us, and building out what you see now.
We see this as an investment into something we wanted to create and see in the world, so it is not a cost we're actively looking to be paid (i.e it's not an investment from us in order to monetise).
Time invested to date
£44,500
Donate
All payments are processed by Stripe who take 1.2% + 20p fee per transaction. All funds are placed into Companion Studio Ltd bank account until Pair Up is established as it's own entity, at which point all funds will transfer to that account.
Contacting us
If you have any questions, are interested in partnering with us or would like to know more, you can contact us at: hello@pair.up.org.
You can follow Companion, the studio that made Pair Up, on Twitter for updates, features and news.