My name is Jason Hwang. and I’m the founder of Likealike. Today, a new version of Likealike, which is a mobile app that helps New Yorkers make like-minded friends through unique events in the city, is now live (available on App Store). In this post, I thought it’d be worth sharing a bit about our story behind the app.

About myself

To introduce a bit of myself, I’m a Columbia grad, worked at Accenture and embarked on my entrepreneurial journey about 4 years ago in Seoul. After a few trials and errors during that period, I came up with this Likealike idea and built an app that helps my fellow New Yorkers, especially introverts like myself and new comers, make friends easily while having a blast at hidden unique events in NYC.

Why Likealike?

Nearly 50 million people visit the U.S for business, school, travel, etc.. New comers without a pre-existing network of friends are often hesitating to navigate the city alone and don’t know where to meet new friends. Some bold minds help themselves through Meetup.com or events found on Google. Nonetheless, getting there all alone feels always uncomfortable.

This is where Likealike comes into play. This brand-new app is different from other community services like Meetup.com in that it focuses on creating a small intimate community for new comers. That is, users, once joined an event listed on Likealike, are entered into a chatroom (size of 3–25 users) dedicated to that particular event to break the ice and get to know new friends attending the same event. So, they can easily set a time and place to meet up to enjoy the event together, feel comfort from a small intimate community, and start building friendships.

Likealike also tackles a pain point of most New Yorkers — there are tons of events and apps listing tons of events. To solve it, Likealike event curators hand-pick unique events to make sure that our users have the best live experience. Some examples of such events are Glow With The Flow@SPiN, Software for Artists Day, Fuckup Nights, Cupid’s Undie Run, Night Nation Run, IVY Volunteer Experience, or The Camp No Counselors.

Where to go from here

Meetup.com is falling. There hasn’t been a major player in the online-to-offline community sector. Likealike will emerge as a leading one as it is strongly committed to bringing new comers and locals end-to-end NYC experience from uncovering rare events to meeting new people to building true friendships.

Get Likealike on App Store. Any feedback is welcome. Feel free to shoot me an email.