Pie, the social app from Bonobos’ founder Andy Dunn, is taking its mission to connect people in real life one step further. On Tuesday, the startup launched a new communities feature that allows people to establish more permanent homes for their social groups on its app, offering an alternative to group texts, Facebook Groups, and other technologies people use to stay in touch.
Originally founded as an events app in Chicago, Pie is backed by investors including Forerunner, Lightspeed, Accel, and angels like Twitter co-founder Ev Williams, and the app has grown to around 300,000 users.
With its latest feature, Community Homes, the company now hopes to encourage its users to join communities, where events are the natural outcome of those connections, but not necessarily the main draw.
The update arrives at a time when younger people are looking to make more connections in the real world, after so many years of online socializing. Instead of solely connecting through social media apps, they’re looking to use digital tools in ways that lead them to real-world connections.
Pie’s new digital group homepages will offer a place for organizers and group members to connect and build relationships beyond a single event, the company says.
Each “home” has its own community feed and other group management tools, like admin and membership controls, a shareable homepage, and event planning resources. However, anyone can share events to the group’s feed, not just the group’s admins, to allow for more natural networking. Pie plans to soon add group chats and another feature that would allow members to post more casual bids for connection, like asking if anyone wants to “hang out and craft together” or watch the “Love Island reunion,” for example, without having a particular plan.
The addition of the Community Homes follows on other changes designed to make Pie less about the events themselves, and more about the people who attend them.
Last December, for instance, Pie changed its activity feed to showcase who you knew who was going to an event, not just what events were being announced. After the change, time on the app grew from 2 minutes to 10 minutes, the team found. More recently, Pie launched a “favorites” feature that lets users build out their public profiles by adding their favorite interests.
Dunn says he was inspired to build the startup after moving from New York to Chicago, where he initially struggled to find community and friendship. At the same time, a movement around joining social clubs was gaining momentum with Gen Z.
“Run clubs, art markets, watch parties– all these things that we’re hearing about in terms of the cultural movement towards being together again,” Dunn told TechCrunch. “And I felt like if we build software for those social clubs, we can create an environment and an ecosystem where people can start to run into other people and belong to communities and start to have deeper connections,” he added, dubbing Pie a sort of “Reddit for IRL.”
The company has since added Nadya Okamoto, who founded a popular run club called Zoomies in New York, as a co-founder and CMO.
“I would say [Pie is] more like the original promise of Facebook and Reddit — if it wasn’t anonymous and toxic,” she said of the social forums site. “Rather than leading with events, which is what so many other great platforms do, I think events are more of a product of having a great community-building ecosystem on the app.”
While Pie is available anywhere, it has more traction in markets like Chicago, New York, and L.A. at present.
