Bonobos founder Andy Dunn’s latest venture is leveraging AI to help users make real-world friends.
If someone is having trouble making friends, a new social media app leveraging artifical intelligence may be able to help with that.
It is called Pie, a platform designed by entrepreneur and one of the co-founders of Bonobos, Andy Dunn, to foster real-world friendships through curated group experiences and smart matching technology. It developed from his own desire to re-connect with friends in the post-pandemic world.
After more than a decade since co-founding the men’s apparel company, Dunn relocated his life from New York’s concrete jungle to Chicago in 2021. While throwing himself into writing a memoir about confronting his battle with bipolar disorder while simultaneously building a company, he confronted one particular problem: he did not have any friends.
“For me, it’s simple. Build a company based on a problem that you personally have. And after 15 years in New York City, I moved back home to Chicago. I thought it would be great because I’ve got family here and friends here. And then I realized I missed, I missed that something, which is I actually didn’t have friends here,” Dunn said.
That painstaking realization became the catalyst for his social media app, which is on a mission to defeat social isolation. Isolation can occur during major life transitions, such as moving to another city, dating, getting married and having kids, according to Dunn. Recognizing there was not a company that addressed this need, Dunn set out on a mission to fill the gap in the market.
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A shot of Bonobos and Pie founder Andy Dunn in 2022. (Pie)
Dunn acquired a company called Sparked Connections, to create an AI-powered quiz that matches a group of people who will likely get along, as he built out his platform. With Sparked by Pie events, users answer a few questions about their interests and preferences before being matched with like-minded people for curated experiences such as group dinners or activities like trivia or pickleball.
When someone has been to at least three group events, retention has been over 70%, according to Dunn.
Simultaneously, the app offers opportunities for people to connect with like-minded communities at events hosted by what Dunn calls “real-life creators.” These creators post their events on the platform with the goal of bringing people together on a reoccurring basis for different activities. The best of them host gatherings every week, he said.
Kyle Casaccio, a creator based in Chicago, is one of them. He kicked off Sunday Morning Club in Chicago as a New Year’s Resolution and today, it is pulling in people from nearby states looking to make friends in an era increasingly consumed by life online.
Kyle Casaccio’s Sunday Morning Club in Chicago. (Kyle Casaccio)
“Like most people, I spent every Sunday being hungover – laying on my couch, watching Netflix, ordering DoorDash, and doing a whole lot of nothing,” Casaccio told FOX Business. “I decided that I wanted to take back a day in my life and wanted to get something out of it, instead of wasting it. I thought why do we waste one day out of the week? It didn’t make sense to me. I decided to do the opposite of that, spending quality time outside, eating healthy, meeting new people and being active.”
What started with only seven people, rapidly grew to hundreds by their fifth meeting. One person drove five hours from Dearborn, Michigan, to the meetup spot in Chicago just to join in, Dunn recalled.
“That was one of these moments as a founder where you realize, okay, what I think we’re building actually is something people really, really need,” Dunn said.
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For the first two years, though, Dunn admitted the concept did not work. Initially, the company focused on one-to-one matching, though Dunn quickly recognized that “you can’t cram a dating experience into a platonic friendship formation like that.”
He changed course after reading therapist Dr. Marissa Franko’s book “Platonic,” which emphasizes that friendships are built by repeatedly encountering the same people in a group setting and eventually, opening up to each other.
Today, his app is available to users in Chicago, Austin, Texas, and in the San Francisco Bay Area, but it already has over 250,000 people viewing plans each month, with 50,000 actively joining.
“Those folks have learned, okay, this isn’t just an events platform. This is actually an answer to how I build a better social life,” Dunn said.
A group gathering for Kyle Casaccio’s Sunday Morning Club in Chicago. (Kyle Casaccio)
Dunn has no plans to stop here, saying that once he figures out “how the monetization engine works,” referring to users purchasing tickets for group match plans through the Sparked by Pie product, he plans to start rolling out the app to more cities.
The company is also exploring AI-generated bios for user profiles and piloting AI to help seed group chats before participants meet in person.
A group gathering for pickleball at Kyle Casaccio’s Sunday Morning Club in Chicago.
“You can do magical things with AI to create great outcomes on human connection, with the focus not being on connection in the app, but getting people in the app and then off the app,” he said.
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