Friendship Apps Connect Strangers Through In-Person Meetups

Paid friendship-matching services are helping people build relationships offline by bringing strangers together for organized social activities. Companies including Real Roots, 222 and Timeleft have gained popularity as loneliness and increasingly online lifestyles encourage people to seek new connections through in-person gatherings.

According to The New York Times, these startups generate millions of dollars in annual revenue. Their services are designed to simplify meeting new people by organizing group interactions without requiring users to swipe through profiles, coordinate schedules independently or negotiate meeting locations.

Alexandra Pitzer, 33, tried one such service after moving from Nashville to Honolulu because of her husband's Army job. Last year, an advertisement on Instagram introduced her to Real Roots, an app that organizes gatherings for women based on the results of a personality survey.

Pitzer paid $290 to meet a group of strangers. She subsequently attended a gathering at a brewery with eight other women, and the group quickly developed connections.

After the paid package ended, Pitzer continued seeing some members of the group. Their activities included camping trips and visits to the beach, extending the relationships beyond the service's organized meetings.

Pitzer described the friendships as potentially long-lasting, emphasizing the personal connection she had developed with the other women.

"I can see most of them being lifelong friends," Ms. Pitzer said. "We have a genuine connection."

Real Roots uses personality surveys to assemble groups of women for initial meetups. Participants who get along can pay the company to organize additional gatherings with the same group over the following several weeks.

The service offers a structured approach to forming friendships, allowing participants to meet several people at once rather than relying on individual introductions. Pitzer's experience illustrates how relationships formed through a paid program can continue after the scheduled package concludes.

Other companies, including 222 and Timeleft, operate in the same expanding friendship-matching market. According to The New York Times, these businesses seek to address the difficulties of building social connections through conventional online platforms by arranging opportunities for strangers to meet in person.