For members - draft, not a decision

What we are building next.

The club is a verified room and an event. This is the plan for what it becomes: a way to say what you need and be matched to the person who has it, without the room ever becoming a directory.

You are the people it is for, so it should not be written without you. Every section below has three buttons. Use them honestly - this is wrong for me is the most useful thing you can press, and nothing here has been built yet.

The core loop

Need, match, introduction, outcome.

Everything else in here serves these four steps.

Step	What happens
1. Need	A founder states a concrete need.
2. Match	The system and the community identify relevant counterparties.
3. Introduction	The connection opens only after both sides agree.
4. Outcome	A meeting, an investment, a supplier, a pilot, a hire or a partnership.

Principles

What will not be traded away for growth.

Principle	What it means in the product
Verified, not open	Every member and organisation is reviewed. Verification state is visible; the documents behind it are not.
Peers, not an audience	Flows are segmented by maturity, role and relevance rather than optimised for reach.
Closed by default	Discovery, profile visibility and introductions are all permissioned. A sensitive member can stay undiscoverable.
Introductions over cold DMs	Messaging opens after mutual consent, or an introduction brokered by a person.
Human judgment stays	Software can rank a match. A person can still curate it.

Your profile

What you would have to fill in.

Matching is only as good as the structure behind it, and every field here is a field you would have to keep current.

Section	Fields
Person	Name, title, LinkedIn, citizenship verification state, circle, visibility.
Company	Name, website, year founded, employee range, funding stage. Amount raised and investors optional.
Technology	Primary and secondary domains, short description, key capabilities.
Maturity	Technical stage and commercial stage, tracked separately.
Needs	Your active requests, optionally visible only to matches or to admins.
Privacy	Discoverability, roster preferences, which fields are sensitive.

Requests

The thing the whole product is built around.

A request is a structured statement of something you need: capital, manufacturing, cloud, legal and export, recruitment, a design partner, a customer, an expert, testing or certification.

Field	Detail
Title	Short and outcome-oriented.
Category	Required. It is what drives the matching.
Urgency	Now, under 30 days, one to three months, or exploratory.
Geography	Israel, US, Europe, global, or a named market.
NDA	Not needed, preferred, or required before any detail is shared.
Visibility	Community-wide, matched providers only, or admin-mediated only.
Status	Draft, active, paused, fulfilled, expired.

Opportunities

The same thing, pointed the other way.

Providers post offers you can opt into, rather than waiting for you to ask.

Type	Example
Investor mandate	Seeking seed to Series A autonomy or battlefield intelligence companies.
Cloud programme	Defense startup credits and architecture support.
Office hours	Export control counsel, twenty minute slots.
Industrial capability	Rapid aerospace CNC, prototype to production.
Design partner call	Seeking technologies for field evaluation.

Introductions

No cold messaging. At all.

You would not be able to message another member or a provider out of the blue. You see a match, you request an introduction with a short note, they accept or pass, and only then does a conversation open. A decline is final - there is no second nudge.

This is the most opinionated decision in the document, and the one most likely to be wrong. It protects the room from becoming a lead list. It also slows down the thing you probably came for.

Finding people

Filters, not a directory.

Investors by stage, cheque size, sector, geography, lead or follow, dual-use appetite. Manufacturers by capability, material, certification, volume, location. Professional services by practice area and specialty. Founders and companies only where that person's privacy setting permits it.

Events

The evening becomes a thread, not a night.

When	What the product does
Before	Reserve a seat, see who is coming where privacy allows, ask for a meeting.
At	Check in by name or QR. Attendance updates live.
After	Say who you met, get follow-up introductions, record what came of it.

If you cannot be listed

The undiscoverable founder.

Some companies in this room cannot appear in anyone's search results. That mode exists: your profile is invisible to provider discovery, your request reaches admins only and can be shown anonymised, a person brokers the introduction by hand, and your identity is disclosed only after you agree to it.

First release

What would actually ship first.

Application, verification and invitation - already live.
Founder profile with stage, domain, maturity, needs and privacy.
Provider profile with category, capabilities, eligibility, verification.
Requests: create, edit, pause, fulfil.
Opportunities, with eligibility and a way to register interest.
Rules-based ranked matches, with the reason shown and an admin override.
Introductions: request, accept or pass, admin-mediated mode.
Messaging that opens only after acceptance.
Events: reservation, capacity, waitlist, attendance.

After that

Where it goes.

Phase	What it adds
Now	Verification, circles, the opening evening.
Next	Profiles, requests, providers, opportunities, matching, introductions, events.
Then	Private Q and A with anonymous answers, warm-introduction paths, meeting booking, saved searches, outcome tracking.
Later	Ask for an investor, supplier or expert in plain language and have the club find them.

Four questions

The part that decides what gets built.

If only one of these could exist this year, which?

Would you actually use it? 0 is no, 10 is I would use it this month.

What is missing that you would need?

What is in here that is wrong, or that you would not want?

Anything else.

Send this without my name. Your answers are stored against your membership either way - that is how we avoid asking you twice - but with this ticked the console shows them with no name attached. Said plainly because a survey that quietly attributes what someone thought was anonymous is how a club loses the honesty it runs on.

Everything above saves as you go, so you can leave and come back.

Questions about any of this? club@isr-defense.tech

Sign in to read this.