Whatever is serious about connecting people

The Future. A new app called Whatever gives users all the tools to plan and ideate dates (except actually landing them the dates). The hope (and original plan) is to help people get off the group chat and into the real world. As message-based social networking takes off, platforms that are able to inspire the most IRL interaction may be the ones that stand out from the crowd.

Programming relationships
If you’ve ever struggled to plan a date — like a real, in-person hang — then Whatever wants to help.

• The company, which launched its app in alpha this past June, uses an in-app discovery feed that aggregates potential date locations across platforms like TikTok, Instagram, Yelp, and Eventbrite.
• Users can also generate date ideas by leveraging AI or posting polls to get advice from friends (the human kind) on where to go.
• And then, naturally, they can put the planned date in a shared calendar.

While that functionality seems simple enough, it makes figuring out something to do — especially after the novelty of those first few months of dates wear off — much easier.

But co-founder Mallory Loar sees the app both filling a need for more private, small group-focused platforms (what she calls the “relationship economy”) and helping tackle the loneliness epidemic that’s struck Gen Z and millennials (time spent with friends has declined significantly since the mass adoption of the smartphone).

During her five years at Discord, she found most Discord servers had only five to fifteen users. Talk about a canary in a coal mine…