Entering adulthood it's really come to my attention that making friends as an adult is weirdly hard. Especially if you were introverted growing up and lack outgoing social skills.
I'm a university student, and I kept noticing that the people around me - myself included - are spending more time scrolling than actually doing anything. Not because we didn't want to hang out. Just because there was no easy way to say "hey, I'm going to the park in an hour, anyone want to come?"
So I started building my own app to battle this issue.
The idea is simple: you drop a pin on a map, write what you're doing (for example: 3v3 basketball, coffee run, just hanging about, whatever really), set a time, and people nearby can join. No groups to manage, no planning weeks ahead. Just spontaneous, real hangouts with other people.
I've been building it solo for a about a month now to get an MVP. The auth flow is done, user profiles work, events show up on the map in real time, and you can join or leave them. It's starting to look like an actual product, just needs some final tweaks and functions.
I've been thinking about how I want to launch it. First idea was to just launch it in my city, see if it actually gets people off their phones and meeting each other, then go from there. Second idea was just launch it on the app store and blast ads on social media to get as many users as possible. Issue with the first idea is, i'm not really sure how I'd do that. Issue with the second idea, obviously, is that the users would be all over the world and not really in the same area as one another, making the primary function of the app rather pointless.
Honest question: would you use something like this? And if not - what would stop you? I'd rather hear the hard feedback now than continue building the wrong thing.
Sooner or later I'll also put a post up with some footage of the app in it's current state.
If you have any suggestions or ideas for me, whether about features, marketing or monetization features for such app, please do let me know!