If you’re about to hit the bars tonight and want to invite a couple friends, you may send off a group text or perhaps make a few phone calls (but who does that anymore).
Sometimes this process takes time and is inefficient, and two new Seattleites want to change that.
Jasjit Singh and Jeff Ames moved from the East Coast after graduating from Ivy League schools to make something that would help people develop and express friendship in real life.
The result is Hotspot, a social app set to debut next week that tries to improve how friends meet up with one another for impromptu events.
“Hotspot is the first event app that helps you invite all your friends when you are actually in a taxi on the way to the bar, not just when you are at home, behind a computer,” Singh told us.
Originally, the co-founders starting building a Meetup.com for friends-of-friends.
“But pretty quickly, we figured out that the real problem wasn’t ‘discovering’ new people but getting them to meet up in real life,” said Singh, who is bootstrapping the company with Ames.
Hotspot lets you tell friends what you want to do, where you’ll be and when you’re arriving — along with turn-by-turn directions — in just three taps. It aims to streamline the constant back-and-forth that can happen between organizers and participants for a given event.
There are certainly others in this space, from group messaging apps like WhatsApp to Facebook’s event platform. But Hotspot touts the fact that it takes benefits from each of its competitors — group texting, check-in apps, event apps — and brings them together in one app.
Those who don’t have the Hotspot app can still receive messages and interact via the web. Hotspot also makes it easy for friends to invite other friends to a “Hotspot.”
Singh said he sees Hotspot as something with “real convening power,” and thinks it’s a piece of technology that, contrary to some apps and tools out there today, can help improve in-person relationships.
“Hotspot will enable people to socialize with more people they don’t know, in real life, thereby helping people develop and express more friendships in real life — which was our original mission to begin with,” he said.