Mission
Not a conspiracy — just incentives. The platforms most people socialise through are paid for attention and advertising, not for durable, in-person relationships. They're good at what they're paid to do.
Feeds are optimised for staying. They're very good at it. Nothing in a feed's business model rewards it for helping you close the app and go somewhere.
Dating apps solve a different problem well, and the framing shapes everything downstream — who you're shown, what the first message is expected to be, what it means if you'd rather just play football.
Event platforms tell you what's on, then leave the hardest part to you: walking in alone. The listing is not the barrier. Arriving by yourself is.
Nobody is doing all three at once — matching on genuine platonic interest, making the first interaction low-effort enough to actually happen, and being paid for the offline meeting rather than the online attention.
In Denmark, reported loneliness roughly doubled between 2000 and 2021, and the sharpest rise was among 16–24-year-olds — the group most online, and the group most often assumed to be fine.
We're not going to pretend we can prove the phone caused it. The research on that is genuinely contested, and anyone selling you certainty is selling you something. The claim we'll actually defend is smaller and, we think, more honest: there's a real gap between the social life people say they want and what the available tools are built to deliver. That gap is worth building against.
Matching people by hand. No algorithm, no waitlist theatre — you tell us what you're into, and a person reads it and thinks about who else it sounds like.
That doesn't scale, which is exactly why we're doing it. Every match made by hand teaches us something about what people actually want to be matched on, and so far it isn't the obvious categories. It's campfires, portrait photography, mushrooms, a specific beach.
If people sign up and never meet anyone, the idea is wrong and we'd rather find out at a hundred users than a hundred thousand. If matching by hand turns out to be the only thing that works, the product doesn't have a business. If the interesting thing about someone can't be captured in a few words they typed themselves, the premise fails.
Those are real risks, not rhetorical ones. We'd rather have them written on the website than discovered in year three.