Andplan is an app we first introduced to you in our list of apps for making friends. Today, we’d like to further explore the features of Andplan, and why you might want to consider it for meeting new people.
To that end, we’ve had a back and forth interview with Adi Wyshogrod and Nick Roberge, the co-founders of Andplan. They’ve been kind enough to tell us about the unique features of this new app, so here’s the interview:
Adi, Nick, What made you create Andplan, and Why is helping people meet new friends important to you?
Adi & Nick: We lived in 4 cities over the course of 5 years and found it extremely difficult to make new friends. We gave a few of the popular friendship and dating apps a try and were VERY unimpressed.
We spent months researching and meeting with neuropsychologists, psychotherapists, and other experts to prove that the current, stereotypical process of chatting and match-making to meet new people just does not work, causes extremely harmful mental health effects, and wastes an incredible amount of time.
This data and research has gone into Andplan’s interface design to precisely match the brain’s natural desires when meeting new people, regardless of whether the user is looking to date or meet friends. By completely eliminating online chatting, Andplan allows users to start building stronger and more meaningful relationships 3x faster and saves them up to 16 hours per week.
What’s wrong with social media and other apps in your perspective? How are they negatively affecting our social life?
Adi & Nick: Current friendship and dating apps put a huge emphasis on users’ photos and gamify the entire process of meeting. Online matchmaking is just not conducive to real life connection. It completely contradicts our human necessity to feel, and to belong, even to love. We knew we had to do something about it.
We’re on a mission to eradicate the destructive mental health effects of traditional friendship and dating apps, decrease loneliness, and help millions of people foster strong human connections by making plans to do what they love. When chatting with others online and trying to form friendships, people create false assumptions, experience fears of rejection and perceived desperation, and suffer high levels of self-consciousness and social anxiety. This process also wastes a huge amount of time, as most online matches never make it to a real-life meetup.
We’re currently working on designing a few studies with psychologists and professors from Boston College and Arizona State University that specialize in human connection and relationships. We plan to conduct and publish the studies after Andplan’s launch to test the mental health effects of current apps and compare them to users’ experience on Andplan. The negative effects of current friendship and dating apps are beginning to be highlighted by professionals across the globe, demonstrating that people are not forming strong relationships but rather experiencing increased depression and anxiety as well as decreased self-confidence and happiness.
How does the Andplan app work? What should they expect after signing-up?
On Andplan, there are almost 500 activities users can choose from to make plans. For example, if a user wakes up at noon on a Saturday and is in the mood for Mexican food at 5pm but has no one to go with, they now have a solution for this. Andplan’s feed is based around activities, not user profiles, and users can link their profile with a partner to make couples plans.
Andplan is available in NYC with plans to expand to other cities soon. To check out Andplan, get on the waiting list or install and try it, go to the Andplan.com.