Are you the only person in your friend group that loves escape rooms? Are you tired of your karaoke buddies flaking? Perhaps there’s finally a friendship app for you.
WashedUp is a social platform designed to help people find companions for local events they don’t want to go to alone. It’s currently available in the Los Angeles area, where users can sign up for a free profile, and then begin browsing and creating events.
How it works:
- If you have an event you’d like to attend, you can create it as a “plan” and invite people to join. You can set a headcount, age range, or make it women-only.
- Users can browse and join other people’s plans — concerts, trivia nights, comedy shows, dinner reservations, fitness classes, thrifting, etc. Or, even a larger networking event, the idea being that you’d be more confident if you showed up with someone else.
Founder Liz Bridges — whose previous endeavors include working at a chimpanzee sanctuary and opening a hotel in Sri Lanka — has always loved meeting and connecting people. She told The Hustle that her friends used to joke, “There’s four of us coming, and then whoever Liz finds on her way here.”
The inspiration for WashedUp came during a stint in Lisbon, Portugal, where she managed to get ~10 people to attend a concert together — a process she described as “no small feat” that involved multiple apps and platforms.
Speaking of all those apps…
There are so many platforms that promise new friends. Some, like The Breakfast and Timeleft, match users for a meal. Others, like MeetUp, allow users to form groups and create events centered around an interest, neighborhood, or lifestyle.
But Bridges found many too cost-prohibitive, too restrictive, too specific, or too complicated to use, requiring users to swipe through potential matches, dating app-style.
“I think all of this technology… is keeping people on their phones and on their computers, even the friendship apps. There’s no short execution to just go meet people,” she said. “The idea of WashedUp is you just put something up there, and then your phone buzzes [when] someone [joins] your plan.”
As WashedUp scales, Bridges hopes to monetize by taking a commission from ticket sales that occur due to the platform. She’s already emailed several businesses asking if they thought more people would attend events if they could find people to go with them… and received a “resounding” yes.
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