Q&A with Connect 574 co-founder Cat Edmonds
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When Cat Edmonds, 26, moved back to South Bend in 2022 to work with the University of Notre Dame, one thing was clear to her: there was a lack of connections. Edmonds took on the challenge to solve this problem through her passion project, Connect 574.
Dubbed the social club for the new generation, Connect 574 is on a mission to foster connectedness and intentional friendships through the various events and online through its member portal. After all is said and done, Edmonds hopes people get a sense of belonging in the South Bend-Elkhart region.
Inside INdiana Business spoke with Edmonds about the work she does to make the region more welcoming for everyone. This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.
Can you tell me about your background?
I’m actually originally from South Bend, born and raised here. I went to the University of Notre Dame right out of high school. I studied management consulting and graduated in 2020. Then I went to Indianapolis for two years through a program called the Orr Fellowship. The focus of that program is to attract and retain young talent right out of school into Indianapolis. You get paired with an organization where you work full time. I worked for Blackink IT. The company provides outsourced IT and cybersecurity to various organizations in the Indianapolis area and beyond. And I was really fortunate coming out of school going into a company where I had an incredible boss, Doug Allgood, the CEO.
My focus was how can we continue to develop and build the brand and how do we grow clients and prospective clients. Through that experience, I learned so much more than just what IT is, I learned to ask the right questions, to stay curious about a company’s business model or understanding their strategy and really it comes down to how you can help people achieve their goals. So I really enjoyed that and I had the opportunity to get involved with various organizations in Indianapolis, which fulfilled me on a more missional level.
So what brought you back to South Bend?
Lou Nanni, who’s the VP of university relations at Notre Dame, had reached out to me and asked if I’d be interested in starting a new program in development around local donor engagement. So obviously having gone to Notre Dame and being from this region, it was like the collision of my two passions. And so I felt really excited to get to start something new at Notre Dame, but also become an advocate for the university and also understand how members in our community want to engage, and how we can further their engagement because we know a rising tide lifts all ships. Notre Dame couldn’t be what it is today without the community, and our community couldn’t be what it is today without Notre Dame. I’m excited for what these next 10 years are going to look like for our community and the university because there’s a lot of exciting things in the works.
How did Connect 574 come about?
When I came back here it was very clear to me that there’s this constant feeling of, “What’s happening?” “How do I make friends?” “There’s nothing to do here,” and my theory is, if we want the South Bend-Elkhart region to be a thriving place people want to call home, people need to make friends and that starts with creating spaces for people to do that and creating a little structure for that to happen. So I started down this route, where I did some market validation to understand what people really wanted.
What I found out was that people don’t know what’s happening, but at the same time people don’t want to go alone to events. And so if people don’t want to go alone to events, it’s hard to get them out and it’s hard to make friends. So in the end, it’s going to be hard to want to stay in this region. So we hosted our first event at River St. Joe in February 2023 through Connect 574, which is essentially my side gig/passion project that I work on. The mission is to help people find friends through intentional connections.
People sign up in advance and we randomly place them in teams before the event. Day of the event, they arrive, get a name tag and get into an ice breaker, before splitting into teams. So at River St. Joe, we were having a tournament with river rocks which is a mix between shuffleboard and curling. And so through this, we build a competitive spirit, camaraderie. And what people find is it’s a lot easier to go alone to an event if you’re on a randomized team because everyone’s randomized.
How has the platform grown in the last one year?
From there, we’ve continued to evolve and what we found out is experiences matter. And the way we structure them matters. At the same time we’ve developed an online member portal [that] people can join for free. We post about different things happening. So to my first point, one of the challenges is people don’t know what’s happening, so we post about things happening in our community, we want to elevate what else is happening. We also have shared interest groups because one way people can grow or deepen their friendship is through common interests. So after meeting at an event, you can hop on the portal and DM each other.
So I have the opportunity where I work full time for the University of Notre Dame focused on local donor engagement. Then on the side, I get the opportunity to help people make friends through intentional connections in our region, with a team that makes it possible because I couldn’t do it on my own.
We started with just experiences and now we have this portal. We launched the portal in March 2023 and now, we have over 1,200 members. We had planned to have 1,200 by the end of 2024, so our member portal has grown really well. From an experience standpoint, we have served over 350 attendees at all the different experiences. At every experience we have on average about 25 individuals who show up and are placed on a team, we’ve continued to see a growing interest from people.
How did you go about finding a co-founder?
My co-founder, Matthew Sheldon, and I met during an entrepreneurship program in town and we stayed in touch. I approached him when I had this idea to join me on this journey and he said yes, so that was great but he really brings a great perspective on the financial side. There’s a book called Traction out there anyone can read and implement that system, and so we started to implement similar pieces to that system into what we do and that forms the rocks we’ve built, metrics we’re hitting and that’s what drives us forward. We meet every quarter and have built a lot of structure, which is unusual in a startup where you’re usually running around with your hair caught on fire.
How did you raise the initial capital to get this going?
Matt and I self-funded it at the beginning and we chose to do that from a standpoint of proofing the concept first before we went ahead to seek external funding. Now, a lot of our funding is coming from corporations and the premium membership model because they’re funding their employees to join us and so we run pretty lean and our focus is figuring out if we can stay self-funded.
There’s circumstances like if we want to implement a new technology or if we want to develop a new role, that’s going to be risky at the beginning because it’s not a revenue generator but could begin generating revenue down the line. That’s where we’re probably going to have to look at the potential investments that we’re going to need to make.
At the moment, any roles we’ve hired are revenue generating and so they keep us focused. We have never had to go out for large investments, but as we look at our goals over the next two years, we’re probably going to have to find other financial investments. We’re hoping to be at a place where it’s a sustainable funding model.
Who’s Connect’s target audience?
I’m always curious about what others think based on our marketing. Lots of people think it’s a lot younger than it actually is. On average, people who trend our experiences are between 33 – 35 years old. That’s the average; there’s some people who are older and some who are younger. What we’re finding in our region is that there’s a hunger for it, and what I’ve noticed is that it’s also dependent on a person’s life stage versus your age. What we see is if you have kids over the age of five, the likelihood of you having time to even engage in any of these experiences is significantly lower and you’re meeting friends through your kids friend’s parents.
How do you go about getting partnerships?
I feel very fortunate living in the South Bend-Elkhart region. Companies, businesses, partners, people want to help people; they want to see this community thrive and grow. And so they’re always curious and so they’re always willing to have a conversation on what this could look like and understand how it is going to better the community and their business, and we want to do that. We want to make their business better. We always say we want to come in as a win-win partnership, otherwise it’s not successful.
Partners have been extremely open to conversation and we’ve been able to be successful in the partnerships we’re in right now because we approach it very clearly as to what the goals are and being on hand to help. I always say partnerships are never going to be great if one party is not interested. So both parties have to have an interest. They have to have curiosity towards it. They also have to care for each other and want each other to win together.
What’s your message to folks who are either thinking of moving here or moving out of South Bend?
There’s so much happening in our region. Honestly, every day I’m excited to see what new things are happening, and with the city announcing their investment into downtown, with the new Beacon project, with Notre Dame purchasing the Tribune building, we’re seeing an increase in restaurants.
In Elkhart, you have the River District and you have great things happening there at Jackson’s rooftop and with their theater, so there’s just a lot of buzz. You also can go up into Southwest Michigan. It is beautiful, and there are really cool breweries there, shops, and activities. So I would encourage people to look broader than maybe the block they live on or the neighborhood they live in or the place they work.
It takes time to get comfortable, but find a place and get involved, that’s what I would always recommend. Join something, do something, because once you start to form those connections, it’s going to get more comfortable.
One of the things I’ve really enjoyed over the past few months is the intramural sports competitions Connect 574 puts on. I’ve been on a pickleball team for five months, and I’m not a good pickleball player, but I’ve enjoyed it a lot. There’s a lot happening and the cool part is I see these people every week, so you get to build that repetition and consistency of checking in and hearing how things are. Just embrace it, embrace the awkwardness, embrace the uncertainty.