Tinder. Bumble. Hinge. So many apps, but still so hard to find a match.
But what if you’re looking not for romance but for friendship, a challenge far fewer software developers have set out to solve? It’s no laughing matter. In 2023, U.S. surgeon general warned that the U.S. was in the midst of an “epidemic of loneliness and isolation.”
Enter Mesh, a new, free service matching groups of Madisonians with potential friends. People sign up by filling out a four-minute online survey that asks, among other things, how creative, practical and outgoing they think they are.
Each Wednesday, members get a text message asking if they’re up for coffee on Saturday. Then the project’s founders, a pair of recent college grads, use an algorithm they created to match as many of the “yes” people as possible in groups of four.
Within 24 hours, everyone who gets matched receives a text message telling them if they’ve been matched, and if so, which local coffee shop to go to on Saturday. (Those who don’t get an invitation one week will still get a text the next week asking if they’d like to be matched again.) On Saturday mornings, they get another message with photos of the people they’ve been matched with, a safety measure that helps members find each other.
“What we want to do is provide really fun and safe connections for people,” said co-founder Michael Orosz-Fagen, 22, who grew up in Monona. “There’s no swiping. There’s no awkward DMs … We’re just that super simple, awesome friend that (says), ‘Hey, I would love for you to meet some people.’”
Orosz-Fagen came up with the idea in 2021 after noticing how many people in his Saint Louis University dining hall were sitting alone. “I wondered, ‘Did they want to be sitting by themselves or did they feel like they had no choice?’” Orosz-Fagen recalled.
He imagined making an app that would connect strangers over a meal. “I just want people to be able to talk with each other, have fun, get to know each other. There’s so many amazing people out there.” He typed the idea into a notes app on his phone, on a list of “things I think that should exist in this world.”
It might have stayed there if it wasn’t for his new friend Stuart Ray, 24, who he’d recently met at a college mixer. “He saw that and said, ‘I can build that,’” Orosz-Fagen said.
The pair, who both graduated this school year, held test events last year for friends and acquaintances in St. Louis before deciding to take the project to the Madison area, where Orosz-Fagen now lives with his parents part-time.
“If you Google ‘how to meet people in Madison, Wisconsin,’ there are Reddit boards that are just full of all these responses … like, ‘How do I do this?’” Orosz-Fagen said.
Madison meetups
The first Madison groups met for coffee on April 6. To date, more than 150 people have filled out the survey and at least 25 people have attended at least one Saturday meet-up.
“I didn’t think that making a friend could be easy,” one member told Orosz-Fagen after having lunch with a friend he met at a Mesh meetup. Another said she’d invited a Mesh acquaintance to a meal at her temple.
“She was able to share her culture with a guy that she met on Mesh,” Orosz-Fagen said. “It’s like, wow, people are actually meeting friends. They’re getting to know each other.”
The service has some similarities to Bumble BFF, a popular friend-finding spin-off of the dating app. But while Bumble BFF matches people one-on-one, Mesh always sets up small groups. Mesh members can also choose to bring a friend along, so groups are sometimes bigger than four. Another similar app, called We3, matches potential friends in threes based on a 150-question personality test.
Mesh is open to anyone 18 and up. The oldest person to sign up so far is in their late 60s, Orosz-Fagen said. But the algorithm tries to match members with others around their same age, so those who are 20 to 30 years old are the most likely to get matched in any given week.
“The people that really seem to like this the most (are the ones who’ve) moved to a new city, are between 20 and 30, or are in some kind of transition,” like a recent breakup or new job, Orosz-Fagen said.
Mesh’s algorithm connects people who gave similar answers on the personality survey, but the company isn’t looking to imitate the “really complex algorithms” that some apps use to make precise matches. “We are of the opinion that most people, if you just talk to them, are actually really fascinating. You’ll get along with them. So we’re just trying to maximize the amount of people you can meet and learn from.”
While the project is mostly about introducing people to each other, Orosz-Fagen also wants more people to frequent independent coffee shops. That’s why every meetup is held at a locally owned cafe like Leopold’s Books Bar Caffè on Regent Street, Michelangelo’s on State Street and Monona Bakery on Monona Drive.
Plans to grow
Orosz-Fagen and Ray both work on the business full-time since graduating from college earlier this year, but the free service doesn’t bring in money, and the founders pay a fee for the texting platform they use.
In the coming weeks, they anticipate adding a paid service, where members would likely pay around $12 a month. Those paying members would get discounts at participating coffee shops, as well as invitations to additional Mesh events, like groups meeting up for Concerts on the Square. They don’t have plans to cut the existing free option, with its weekly invitations.
“We really want to provide as much value as possible for free. If you never pay a cent for Mesh, that’s totally fine,” Orosz-Fagen said.
So far, the founders have pitched Mesh at around 20 business competitions and heard “a lot of nos.” But Orosz-Fagen points to the success of related businesses, including 222, which curates groups of six who meet up for an evening of activities. The service, currently available in Los Angeles and New York City, has raised more than $1 million in venture capital.
That “was really helpful for letting us know that we’re working on the right thing,” Orosz-Fagen said.
In the next couple months, the pair hope to begin organizing meetups in Austin and Washington, D.C. too, two other cities that top the national list for the most new residents moving in.
Eventually, Orosz-Fagen hopes there will be Mesh groups across the country, serving visitors and residents alike. “Our vision is that we want anyone to go to any major city in the United States … meet new people and try great coffee.”
