The next step would be for the founders to start personally arranging such activities and see what works and which parts are hard.
There's still an existing community for games like the original PC Red Faction, as crazy as that is. Perfectly fun games, just needs players and some names in game streaming to pick it up.
Does it? There might be some games to avoid from publishers that are still active, but I imagine there's a ton of effectively-abandonware games out there to build your idea upon.
I like the idea of booting up old games in that format as well.
It's definitely a hard problem, but with the increase in recreation time, especially for creative workers, that we're continuing to see I think it could be a big company.
Yes! If you really believe you have a solution to a problem, then it makes sense to execute that solution in a way that doesn't scale, to verify that, with infinite resources, the solution works, and it feels good. This is a necessary, but not sufficient, condition for what comes next, which is (roughly) about making the production more efficient with technology. If you can maintain the utility of the solution and drive the cost down, there may be profit in those hills!
In the last few months this has actually become a relatively straightforward problem to solve thanks to now having 10x more data on various social activities due to the pandemic.
I thought the pandemic showed us all that we don't need to pay anyone money to connect. We could just go for a walk together and talk. If that unnecessary massive part of the economy was to disappear, we would have more free time to connect, too.
I hate to say this, but just GTFO the house and go do something. Anything. Do something neither of you have before, explore the world together. Start by going for a walk someplace. If you don't even know what you like how is someone else going to know?
Curated activities are for tourists on vacation.
It's probably generational and based on how one interacts with others (are most of their friendships online or not).
Everywhere I've lived since has lacked this sort of resource, and it's made meeting people & getting out and exploring much less newbie-friendly.
Maybe I just need to build the change I want to see in the world...
nyc has theskint, differnet neighborhood specific events listings (bushwickdaily, brokelyn come to mind for me), industry/event category specific listings (like different calendars for music / concerts, calendars for comedy, etc).
one problem is that these event discovery streams are scattered across mediums. for example you might find some nyc events scattered across some promoter's IG account, some that are advertised on TikTok, some on some old fashioned blog style website like those I initially listed above.
aggregators exist as well but they tend to be un-sexy and not likely to find long-tail / niche stuff / cooler more underground stuff.
the solution is often to ask people around you or involved in the space you're interested in how they find out about events. they will then tell you about the mailing list, or the IG account, or the website, or whatever.
of course, smaller cities and towns often don't have as large of 'scenes'. and anywhere you go, it's often more fruitful to just create the scene you want to be a part of.
What will they like? Which places will be interesting?
It's not at all a given that someone with data and information can't give a more informed opinion on what options are available that may be popular with a set of people than those people themselves.
Why should curated activities only be for tourists on vacation?
There are tons of activities people aren't aware are available, or are aware of but don't know whether would be suitable for them, and which they avoid because there's an opportunity cost to making the wrong choice. Exploring that yourself can be fun, but it's also hit and miss.
The biggest problem to me with this idea isn't the idea that they can do better, but that even the founder took an emotionally charged situation to get to the point of verbalising that this was what he wanted. Wanting to help people who aren't necessarily aware that there's an issue someone could solve for them is tricky.
I live in London. There's stuff to do all over the place. If anything, the challenge is filtering and curating. I'd love a site that did it for me. Especially if it could also book things. Heck, I might even pay for personalised recommendations if it could cut the time I spend on choosing.
But I don't think I'm typical.
I suspect a lot of their potential userbase would be really hard to reach.
You could book an activity on Airbnb, they offer that. You could go kayaking. You could go apple/pumpkin picking. etc. etc
You just have to think of things.
EDIT: With respect to Airbnb, they're all group activities, which for the most part makes them less interesting to me. I'd like the idea, a map, tickets/bookings if necessary, but for the most part I'd have no interest in guided activities. I get that makes it harder to profit of because you're giving away half the work by telling users about the activity.
That's the point. Pick something at random, you'll learn what you find interesting together. You can even bond over discussions about what you didn't like. As long as "random" isn't something that's a hard NO for either party you should be good.
One of the more effective ways of knowing where to go, is by talking with friends and collecting, curating that information over time. I don't know if this start-up is capable of replicating that experience - there are tons of urban blogs and the like that claim to do the same that I rarely use - but the problem domain and general solution seems reasonable.