Greet - a new way to make friends irl

In 2017, I had recently moved to NY and a friend of mine and I realized something wild - the most densely populated city in America might be the loneliest. Time and time again we heard from folks that making new friends in NYC was impossible - people were too busy, too tired, already had friends, etc. Something had to be done.

Using reddit/r/nycmeetups, we met with hundreds of people from various backgrounds, bought them a beer or dinner and just tried to understand what made New York so difficult when it came to making new friends. We met with NYU psychology professors to understand the science behind adult friendship. Overall, it boiled down to one thing - people crave friendship. but adults are lazy and need a social construct to enable friendship. So we got to work.

After weeks of iterating, spreading the word however we could, and building a product we would love, we came up with an MVP. Each week, we would send out an email to a group of 3-5 members with a set of times that fit their schedules. Once times were selected we would tell them where to meet, and who to look for. The rest was a mystery - think "Dinner with 12 strangers" meets meetup.com. Sometimes they would have something in common, sometimes they wouldn't.

We also developed an ambassador program to recognize users who were attending the most visits per week and rewarding them along the way. At our peak, we had over 3000 users, 50% of which were active on multiple hangouts per week. We finally felt that we were solving a burning human need and helping people along the way.

A super exciting and unexpected development was when we stumbled upon a monetization model. In short, I created partnerships with the top 20 restaurants that our users were visiting regularly to negotiate a % of the bill as "commission". Restaurants had no problem handing it over when they realized the traffic and quality of people we were delivering, especially when we focused our attention on mom and pop shops that were struggling during lunch or off hours.

Unfortunately, for personal reasons myself and our founder decided to go our separate ways. Although the dream of continuing Greet was strong (we even began getting the eye of meetup.com because we were poaching their users) we had personal goals that wouldn't allow us to continue our journey. However, I learned an immense amount about user-centric product design, creating a social graph in the 21st century, and how powerful it is to build a product that can truly help people.