The friend-finder for people who'd rather meet over coffee than match online. No swiping. No dating. Just the people nearby who share your vibe.
We have 1,200 followers and no one to call when our flight gets cancelled. Linger is built for that gap — the one between online connection and real human company.
Technology promised to connect us. Mostly, it just isolated us behind a glow. Linger is built for the part of being human that needs to actually be in the room.
Linger is the friction-light version of finding a friend nearby. You tell us what you're into. We surface people who share your vibe within a short walk. You suggest a hangout. That's it.
Pick from 16 interests — coffee shops, hiking, board games, live music. We use these to find people on the same wavelength.
See who's around — distance shown in walk-times, not GPS pins. Shared interests are highlighted. Verified Lingerers get a ✓.
Skip the small-talk loop. We suggest the activity, the place, and the time based on your shared vibes and walk-time. Tap accept and you've got a plan.
Click through the live prototype. Type into the fields, send a "hi", make a hangout plan. Everything works the way it will when we launch.
Request an invite for free, or lock in the founding-member rate on Linger+ and skip the waitlist entirely.
Optional 30-second selfie + ID check. Verified members get a badge and higher discovery placement.
Distance is shown in walk-time buckets. Your exact location is never shared with other users.
A 24/7 trust & safety team reviews urgent reports within an hour, with AI-assisted triage flagging scam, catfish, and dating-app misuse patterns the moment they appear. Confidential and never shown to the reported user.
Built-in safety tips, "share live location" for a hangout, and a 24/7 hotline with trained counselors.
No. Linger is explicitly for platonic friendship. The product, the matching, the community guidelines, and the reporting categories are all tuned for friend-making. Treating Linger as dating is a reportable offense.
Bumble BFF makes you swipe — friendship by Tinder mechanics. Meetup is event-based — you go to a room of strangers and hope. Linger is in-between: you find a specific nearby person who shares your interests, then suggest a specific hangout. It's a structured shortcut to "what would naturally happen if you ran into each other twice."
$24/year for Linger+, locked in for as long as you stay subscribed. After we open generally, Linger+ will be $39/year. Founding members also get a 🥇 badge on their profile and early access to events in their city.
We're starting in the DC metro area — and you decide where. It's a race: the neighborhood with the most people on the waitlist is where Linger opens first. So get your corner of DC — or Arlington, Alexandria, Bethesda, Silver Spring — on the list and rally your friends. More cities follow from there.
Unlimited "say-hi's" (free users get 5/day), the ability to see who's said hi to you, travel mode (connect in cities before you arrive), members-only weekly events, and an ad-free experience with no sponsored venue suggestions.
Three streams: Linger+ subscriptions (~70% of revenue), sponsored venue partnerships with local cafés and parks (~25% — clearly labeled, paying us when a real hangout happens there), and curated paid events (~5%). We don't sell user data, don't run ads, and don't offer profile-boost packs.
Your phone number is used only for sign-in. Your location is stored at city level, never shared at GPS resolution. We don't sell data to advertisers or brokers. You can export or delete everything in one tap from Settings.
Linger is raising a $3M seed to launch its first three cities. Below: the top questions investors have asked. The full deck is one tap away.
18-month runway. Co-led round; targeting $1.5–2M from lead. Open to strategic from social, health & welfare, or community-focused funds.
Three streams, each aligned with the user instead of conflicting with the value prop:
Projected LTV $84, targeted CAC $14, ~14-month payback — illustrative, pre-launch model figures.
$14B TAM (global friendship & social discovery). $4.2B SAM (North American 25-44 urban). $180M SOM (top 30 US cities, 1% household penetration in 3 years). Market sizing is illustrative and forward-looking.
For context: Match Group did $5.4B in 2024 — declining for the first time. Friendship is the next category to be unbundled from dating, and nobody has won it yet.
Three tipping points landed at once:
We're pre-launch and building in the open. Our focus is reaching real launch density — roughly 500 active members — in our first DC-area neighborhood. Which one? You decide: the neighborhood with the most people on the list goes first.
The waitlist and founding-member pre-orders above are how we're proving demand neighborhood by neighborhood. We'll publish real traction here as it's earned, not before.
AI shows up where it makes the product safer and quieter, not where it does the talking for users. We're explicitly not building AI icebreakers, AI-written bios, or an AI “friend.” That would break the real-people, real-plans promise.
Where it earns its place:
Safety is built in, not bolted on:
Local network density. Friendship is hyperlocal — once a neighborhood hits critical mass, it's very hard for a new entrant to displace it. We launch city-by-city to build defensible density before scaling. Each city becomes its own moat.
Secondary moat: the "Linger Mayor" host network. Vetted local hosts run weekly events. They become brand ambassadors with reputational skin in the game.
14 slides covering thesis, product, market, business model, traction, team, and the ask.