01 LinkedIn connected everyone, which helped no one in particular
A trusted community, a noisy tool
The idea Rina Barbut brought to ETREXIO was easy to say and precise about its audience: LinkedIn meets Tinder, built for JConnect Forum, which she describes as a network for young Jewish Professionals from Europe and Israel to encourage innovation, nurture business cooperation, share knowledge and skills, attract investors and offer access to new markets.
The problem it aimed at was one every tight-knit business community knows. The general networks connect you to the whole world, which in practice means noise: cold pitches, irrelevant profiles, and the same feed as everyone else. Meanwhile the community's real advantage, a baseline of trust between its members, had no tool built on top of it. Rina wanted that trust to have a mechanic. Not another feed to scroll, not another inbox to ignore, but the one interaction pattern proven to make introductions feel effortless: cards, a swipe, and a match that both sides chose.
02 The Tinder mechanic, rebuilt for business
Professional profiles, a swipe, a match
We built JConnect Forum as a mobile app on both Android and iOS, with an admin panel behind it, taking the project from UI and UX design through prototype, backend and delivery. Members register with their professional information, so what travels on each card is business substance: who this person is, what they do, what they are looking for. The feed of cards is swiped the way the world already knows how to swipe, and when two professionals choose each other, a match notification lands on both phones.
That mutual-choice moment is what separates the mechanic from a directory. Nobody gets cold-contacted; every conversation starts because both sides already said yes. From there the app's job is to get out of the way and let the business connection happen, while the admin panel gives the community's operators the controls to run the network behind it.
- Registration built on professional profiles rather than social ones
- Swipeable cards carrying business substance
- Match notifications when two members choose each other
- Delivered on both Android and iOS, from UI/UX and prototype to launch
- Admin panel for running the community behind the app
03 Matching quality is the entire product
The algorithm did the introductions
A swipe app lives or dies on what shows up next. Show members irrelevant cards and the swiping stops within a week; show them the right ones and every session ends in a plausible business conversation. The matching algorithm we built for JConnect Forum was the quiet engine of the product, deciding which professionals should cross paths, and it earned its keep in the most concrete way a networking product can.
Major collaborations between users came out of matches the algorithm made. Not vanity connections or collected contacts, but members of the community doing real business together because the app put the right two cards in front of the right two people. Within its community, JConnect Forum became a strong, well-used app, which for a community product is the whole game: it worked where it was built to work.
04 A 5.0 Clutch review, milestone by milestone
Like Tinder for Business, in her words
When Rina later reviewed the project on Clutch, she gave it 5.0 and described the scope in her own words: "Developing a Mobile App in a short time - Like Tinder for Business", covering UI and UX design, a prototype, the backend, and delivery on Android and iOS.
Her account of the collaboration is specific in the way only a real project can be. Weekly updates shared via email, weekly status calls that became daily near launch, and a team she found very responsive and accessible through a shared WhatsApp group. On delivery: "they delivered each milestone in the SOW even before the estimated time of completion." What impressed her most, in her telling: a great company culture, very responsive and accessible, very structured and professional, a can-do approach built on best practices from experience, and customer satisfaction as the top priority.
Asked what ETREXIO should improve, she answered: "Very happy with the project flow. I wouldn't ask for any change. Keep it up, professional!"
05 A community network that produced real business, and a relationship that kept going
The outcome
JConnect Forum launched in 2023 as a complete product: the mobile app with its swipe-and-match core on Android and iOS, and the admin panel running the network behind it. Within the community it was built for, it became a strong and well-used app, and its matching algorithm enabled major collaborations between users, the kind of outcome networking products promise on their landing pages and rarely deliver.
The engagement did not end at launch. We still work with JConnect Forum today, which makes this one of the longer-running relationships among our cases, and the quietest proof the launch left behind: the founder who reviewed us at 5.0 kept choosing to work with us. The lesson generalizes to anyone building for a defined community. A network app for everyone competes with LinkedIn and loses; a network app built on a community's existing trust, with a mechanic that respects members' time and an algorithm that takes matching quality seriously, can become infrastructure for that community. JConnect Forum did, in the place it was designed to.
