Adult Women Lose Half Their Friends Every 7 Years – Here's the Fix

01 /The Concept

As adults, friendships built in school and college gradually fade away. Making new friends becomes genuinely difficult. Women, for instance, lose roughly half their close friendships every seven years, with no obvious mechanism for rebuilding what's lost. The result: about two-thirds of Americans report feeling lonely – and it's hard to blame them.

RealRoots built a platform where adult women aged 21 to 65 can "guaranteed" make new friends. And all it requires is showing up at the right time and place.

In practice it's slightly more involved, but not by much:

- First, fill out a profile describing your interests – then the platform matches you with a group of women in your city who share those interests.

- Then show up at an offline meetup, held in a pre-reserved café, restaurant, or similar venue.

- New members go through a six-week trial period during which they demonstrate consistent attendance and, in the judgment of existing group members, a non-toxic presence.

- After passing the trial, a member gains access to the broader RealRoots community: weekly group meetups, app-based individual introductions, and group chats.

Every RealRoots meetup is led by a moderator assigned by the startup – someone whose job is to keep conversation flowing naturally without long silences or awkward pauses.

The startup recruits its own moderators. For them, it's a side gig: evenings on weekdays from 6–9pm and Saturday mornings from 11am–1pm. The startup pays per session.

Each individual meetup costs $25. The six-week trial period costs $289.

RealRoots is currently in Y Combinator and published its platform details on the YC site just yesterday. Despite being at an early stage, the platform claims to be running meetups across all US states, the UK, Canada, and Australia.

02 /Why It Matters

Interestingly, a similar startup made the rounds online just yesterday.

European startup Les Amis built a members-only club where women can build what the startup calls a "friend family" – connections with women who share their interests, sustained in both offline and online contexts.

The flow: create a profile and declare your interests and aspirations. Then the app recommends offline events in your city that match those interests – poetry evenings, rooftop parties, themed workshops. Unlike RealRoots, these events aren't run by startup-employed moderators but by partner organizers who already run such events in the city.

Every two weeks the app also generates personal introduction recommendations, pairing members with others in the club. After viewing a profile, a member can start a chat or propose a café meet or a walk. The app also includes themed group chats for ongoing online conversation.

Les Amis started in Europe and is now testing the US market, starting in New York. NYC membership is $70 per month, or $65/month when paid quarterly, with a one-time $25 joining fee. Individual events cost an additional $55. More than 30,000 people have attended Les Amis events, and the startup's expected annual revenue is approaching $1 million.

Swurf ([related review](/review/pochemu-govorjat-chto-predprinimatel-vsegda-odinok)), a Scottish startup that previously operated as a marketplace of work-friendly cafés, restaurants, and hotel lobbies for entrepreneurs and freelancers, has been pivoting toward facilitating offline meetups – for entrepreneurs rather than women specifically.

River ([covered previously](/review/ideja-s-javnymi-priznakami-uspeha)) built a platform where online influencers can organize in-person meetups with their followers in cities around the world. The early influencers who adopted it are also in the business and entrepreneurship space.

More broadly, a meaningful wave of startups is building platforms for offline events and meetups. The driver: the internet has made many people lonelier, a point underscored by the US Surgeon General's 2023 report titled "Our Epidemic of Loneliness and Isolation."

Most of these platforms target entertainment-focused social events for younger audiences – with friendship as a happy byproduct. Examples include Plots ([reviewed here](/review/pojdjom-potusuemsja)), Pie, and POSH.

03 /Opportunities

The role of offline events in social life has shifted dramatically. Decades ago, people attended lectures, workshops, and meetups to access information directly from experts. Today, that information is more accessible and more comprehensive online than it ever was in person.

Strip away pure fan events – concerts, sports – and the two dominant reasons people attend offline gatherings now are: to meet others with similar interests, and to make real friends. The informational content of an event is mostly just the catalyst and the filter.

And the need to make new friends has become acute, because the internet gave us breadth of connection while destroying depth.

A recent study identified what's being called a "fourth space" emerging in social life.

The first two are eternal: home and work. The third – cafés, bars, clubs, public places – is familiar but limited; conversations formed there rarely extend beyond the room, often because there's no shared interest to anchor them.

The fourth space is offline, but interest-filtered: physical environments where people with specific shared interests can meet, form real relationships, and carry those relationships forward into ongoing online and offline contact.

The direction worth pursuing: building platforms for "fourth spaces" where people with specific shared interests can reliably find each other in person and sustain those connections.

What fourth space would you want to create – and for which audience? The problem might start by solving your own loneliness.