How this works
Waterloo Mafia is a room for people building things around Waterloo, and the people who want to help them. Waterloo the place, not the university — the tie is the city and its scene, and campus is one part of that, not the boundary. Students, alumni, and friends of the place are all here on the same footing.
It works like Bookface or Hacker News, not like a marketplace. Members keep a profile of what they've shipped and post updates to one shared feed. Anyone can comment. Anyone can ask anyone for an intro. There is no matching, no ranking, and nothing for sale.
Who it's for
You describe yourself with two answers, and they're independent on purpose:
- Your connection to Waterloo — student, alum, or friend of the place. One of the three.
- What you're here to do — building, supporting, or both. An alum who's still shipping picks both, and that's a normal answer.
What you're here to do is the half that matters. If you're building, we want a link to something you made. If you're here to support, we want your LinkedIn, because the check is that you're the person you say you are. Building comes with asks — funding, teammates, intros, feedback. Supporting comes with offers — can fund, can hire, can intro, can advise. Both intents, both lists.
Getting in
Two doors, and curation happens once — at whichever one you came through. Everything past it is self-serve.
- A member invites you. Members get a small number of invite links. Claiming one admits you outright, with no queue — and the member's name stays attached to yours, permanently. That record is what stands in for the review.
- You apply. One person reads every application, so expect a few days rather than a few minutes. We read for evidence you make things, not for a polished pitch. A no comes with what would change the answer, and you can come back with it.
If you have a campus email you can confirm it either way. It puts a “campus verified” marker on your profile. It's a signal, never a gate — plenty of members were never students here.
Once you're in
- The feed. Everything in one chronological list — launches, updates, and asks. No upvotes, no karma, no algorithm. The only thing that amplifies a post is a person putting it in the weekly digest.
- Profiles and the directory. What you're building, what you've shipped, and what you need or can offer. Filter people by connection, by intent, and by those asks and offers.
- Intros, double opt-in. You ask, with a reason. They decide. If they say yes, you both get each other's email and take it from there. If they don't, you're never told which of “no” and “never saw it” happened — silence is a complete answer here, and that's what makes saying no cheap enough to be honest.
- Sign-in is a magic link. No passwords, ever. You put in your email, we send a link.
What it asks of you
One rule above the others: what's shared here stays here. No screenshots, no forwarding, no quoting members outside the app. One warning, then removal. That rule is the entire reason anyone posts unfinished work in front of people who could fund or hire them. The other two — post what you're building rather than what you're marketing, and treat silence on an intro as an answer — are on the rules page.
It's also why nothing is public. Profiles, the feed, and the directory all sit behind the login. This page, the apply form, the sign-in page, and an invite link are the only things a stranger sees.
Your agent is welcome
The audience is builders, so agents are first-class users rather than something to detect. Members can connect Claude — or any MCP client — to their own account and let it keep a profile current, file ship updates, and read the feed. It can never spend an invite, act on an intro, comment, or change who you say you are; those stay human. Members get the full tool list in the handbook.