Why we're building this.

Where this started.

I went to college in San Juan and watched the same thing happen on every campus weekend. Friends wanted to go to a literature night at a small bookstore in Santurce, an indie band at a venue most people hadn't heard of, a gallery opening on a Wednesday. They didn't go. Nobody else's schedule lined up. Nobody wanted to walk in alone. The plans existed. The people to go with were the missing piece.

After I graduated in 2020 I spent years touring with DJs and artists, working with labels in Latin urban, house, and techno music. London. Paris. Santiago de Chile. New cities every few weeks. The hotel lobby bar became the default plan, not because I wanted it to, but because anything else required more energy than I had alone.

The pattern was the same in every city. Plenty to do. Almost no one doing any of it together unless they were already a group. I built HAOT for the people I was watching stay in.

The evidence.

The personal observation is one thing. The data is another.

In June 2025, the World Health Organization Commission on Social Connection published From loneliness to social connection, the most comprehensive global report ever assembled on the topic. The headline finding: loneliness affects one in six people worldwide, and is associated with approximately 871,000 deaths every year.¹

The numbers worsen for younger people. Among adolescents aged 13 to 17, 20.9% report feeling lonely. Among adults 18 to 29, the figure is 17.4%. The rates decline with age.¹

The U.S. Surgeon General reached the same conclusion in 2023. Approximately half of American adults report experiencing loneliness. The mortality risk of being socially disconnected is comparable to smoking up to fifteen cigarettes a day.²

The trend is measurable and getting worse. In 2003, Americans aged 15 to 24 spent about 150 minutes a day with friends in person. By 2020, that number had fallen to 40 minutes, a decline of nearly 70% in less than two decades. Single-person households in the United States grew from 13% in 1960 to 29% in 2022. Trust in other people, measured by long-running polls, fell from 45% in 1972 to 30% in 2016.²

Eight countries have now adopted formal national policies on social connection: Denmark, Germany, Japan, Finland, the Netherlands, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and the United States. The recognition is finally institutional. The response, in product form, is not.¹

This is not a niche. It is not a mood. It is not a generational complaint. It is a public health crisis that the World Health Organization, the U.S. Surgeon General, and at least eight national governments have now formally acknowledged. The apps most people use to address it were not designed for it.

The most connected era is also the loneliest.

We carry every person we've ever met in our pocket. We can call college friends from a moving train, video our parents from a different continent, and DM strangers on the other side of the world before our coffee gets cold. This should be the easiest moment in human history to feel surrounded by people. It isn't.

The numbers above are not anomalies. The richest, most networked, most app-saturated generation in history is also the most disconnected one we've measured.

The loneliness economy is real, and most of it is missing the point.

Healthcare costs from isolation run into hundreds of billions a year. Productivity loss from disengagement is its own line item. Wellness brands sell community by the bottle. Subscription apps sell belonging in a feed. The market has noticed the problem. The market has not solved it.

The reason is straightforward. Almost every product addressing loneliness is a tool to help you feel less alone while you are still alone. A meditation app talks you through it. A community feed shows you other people who feel the same way. A dating app puts a thousand strangers in your pocket but does not put anyone across the table from you.

The thing that fixes loneliness has not changed: showing up somewhere, with people, doing something. Everything else is a coping strategy.

Things to do are not the problem.

Open any city's calendar on a Saturday morning. Pilates studios with morning flows. Rooftop bars with curated DJs. Gallery openings with free wine. Run clubs leaving from coffee shops. Pop-up dinners with chefs you cannot pronounce. Comedy basements. Live jazz. Sunset hikes. The supply of things to do has never been higher.

And millions of people experience none of it. They scroll past it on Instagram. They consider going. They imagine standing alone in a doorway, scanning for someone they know, sliding their phone out to look busy, and they decide to stay home.

It was never a lack of things to do. It was a lack of people to do them with.

The fix is presence, not optimization.

The standard tech response to a friction problem is to optimize the friction away. If introductions are awkward, build a smarter algorithm. If meeting strangers is uncomfortable, give them a profile to scroll first. If conversations are hard, autocomplete them. The product gets cleaner. The friction goes down. The human moment that the friction was protecting goes down with it.

We made the opposite bet. The friction in meeting people in person isn't a bug. Walking into a room. Saying hello. Sharing a class, a meal, a run. Looking up forty minutes later and realizing you stopped checking your phone. That's not the friction. That's the thing.

What HAOT does is not eliminate the friction. We make it less intimidating. We pick the room. We pick the activity. We pick a small group of people whose energy matches yours. You walk in the door. We get out of the way.

Dating apps can't solve this. We should stop asking them to.

Every social-app pitch deck for the last decade has had a slide about loneliness. Tinder has talked about friendship. Bumble shipped BFF mode. Hinge added prompts about your weekend. None of it has moved the loneliness numbers because the architecture of those products was never designed for connection. It was designed for selection.

Selection mechanics are good at one job: helping you decide whether to spend an evening with one specific person. They are bad at almost everything else. They train you to evaluate strangers like products. They concentrate attention on the small minority of profiles the algorithm rewards. They leave the door open to harassment, because messaging is the front door.

We are not making a better dating app. We are making something that isn't a dating app at all, and we are shipping the rules that prove it.

What HAOT actually is.

HAOT is a social-intent marketplace. You tell the app what kind of plans you would actually show up for. Late-night literature readings. House music sets at smaller venues. Sunrise hikes. Pickup soccer in any park. A Sunday afternoon at a museum that's better with company. Whatever you would do if a few of the right people were doing it with you.

Anyone can host. You browse what people in your city are putting together this week, or you put one together yourself. HAOT matches you with a small group of people whose energy matches the plan, not just the day. You confirm. You go. You meet four to ten people instead of swiping through four hundred profiles.

After the event, you tap who you would hang out with again. If they tap yes back, a chat opens. If they don't, nothing happens. No notification. No rejection. No soft-decline performance. Mutual signals are the only signals. The chat exists to plan the next thing, not to negotiate one.

This idea took shape across cities. San Juan. Chicago. London. Paris. Smart, kind people staying home on Saturdays in places that had more to do on any given night than most cities have in a week. The app is global from day one. Anyone in any city can host. The city is not the product. The platform is.

The five rules that make this not a dating app.

We made these architectural, not aspirational. They aren't a content policy. They are how the product is built. Removing any one of them turns HAOT into a worse version of something that already exists.

First. No messaging anyone you haven't met. There is no DM inbox. Strangers cannot pitch you. Cold openers don't exist.

Second. No profiles to swipe. There is no queue of single-portrait headshots. People exist on HAOT as the people they are at events, not as a curated still.

Third. No solo plans. Every event is four people or more. Pairs that drift toward a date can do that on their own time, on their own platform. Ours is for groups.

Fourth. No one-sided matches. Both sides say yes. There is no way to message someone who hasn't said yes back to you, ever.

Fifth. No DM spam. Two strikes and your account is gone. The penalty for treating HAOT like a dating app is losing access to HAOT.

The world we're trying to build.

A world where your social life is limited by your curiosity, not your contact list. Where moving to a new city in your thirties isn't a six-month grief project. Where a Wednesday night doesn't default to delivery and a screen. Where the people you stood next to at a Wednesday gallery night end up at a Sunday cookout in someone's backyard because the Wednesday went well, and both of those things were easy to find on the same app.

We're not going to fix loneliness with a launch. Loneliness is something the next decade is going to spend a lot of energy on. The platforms that matter will be the ones that respect the offline part. People in the same room, doing something together, on purpose. That part of the story has not been disrupted, will not be disrupted, and is the part we are most excited to take seriously.

Show up. That's it.