A bet on the real thing, in an age of very good substitutes.
We've never had better substitutes for each other.
The podcaster whose voice you know better than your neighbour's. The feed that reads your mood. The group chat that's kept you all in touch for years, and in the same room maybe twice. And now AI companions, built to listen, to remember, to talk back as long as you like, and to never ask for anything in return.
Each offers a kind of connection with all the friction taken out.
That's why they win: effortless, endless, always on. And each is missing the one thing the real version has: another person actually there with you.
None of us is really choosing this.
We're drifting into it. The substitutes for connection just got better at holding our attention, and they compete for the same hours as the real thing. So we spend a little more time with them each year, and a little less with each other.
This is one of the defining problems of the coming decade.
A whole generation could settle into a comfortable kind of isolation and barely feel it happen. Not lonely, exactly. Just rarely in a room with anyone.
The loud version already has a name.
A minister for loneliness in the UK. A national strategy in Sweden. The acute kind, the people with no one at all, is finally being treated as the public problem it is. But it's a spectrum, not a category, and most of us are on it somewhere, usually without a word for it.
The drift isn't inevitable.
The substitutes aren't winning because they're better for us, they're winning because they're easier. Waddly is a bet that if we take away enough of the friction, the real thing wins more than it loses. That means doing the part everyone else skips.
Every friendship app solves the introduction.
Some apps match you and leave the rest to you. Others get you into a room together once, then stop. Either way, what you get is an introduction, and the introduction was never the hard part.
The hard part is the second meeting, and the tenth.
It takes around fifty hours of shared time before someone becomes even a casual friend, and more than two hundred before they're close. An app that stops at hello has barely started.
One small thing has to keep happening.
Someone picks a time, names a place, says it out loud, again and again. It sounds like nothing, but it's where the friction actually lives. Without that plan, friendly people stay friendly and never quite become friends, and old friendships go quiet and stay that way.
So Waddly makes the plan, and keeps making it.
A shared experience, strangers and familiar faces in the mix. The ones you click with become part of your circle, and we keep finding new things for you to do together. No feed, no chat to keep alive. You say yes, you show up, we do the rest.
Show up enough times, and something shifts.
The weeks that were thinning begin to fill again. Faces you're glad to see, strangers who quietly became people you'd miss. Not a better substitute for each other. The actual thing. That's the world we're after, and it matters more every year: one where it's easy to say yes to each other, and where real friendship is within anyone's reach.
Laura & EricWaddly · Malmö