June 25, 2013

Grouper Social Club

No not the fish. Have you heard of Grouper? I have been out of the dating life for a long time so obviously I wasn’t not familiar with this new dating idea. I do have to tell you, brilliant! If I were single, this is what I would be doing…. So what is it? It is basically a way to go out on a date with your friends. You bring 2 friends and the opposite sex (or the same-sex) brings 2 friends. You meet at a bar for drinks and figure out if anyone at the table wants to pursue a relationship. In layman’s terms : You download the “grouper app”. You enter a few preferences such as how much older or younger you want the people you are meeting to be, and what kind of bar you want to go to. It matches your Facebook profile to someone else on Facebook. The service requires the two people it connects to each bring along two friends on the date, creating 3-on-3 outings that are reminiscent of the days we used to date in college.

Grouper keeps the identities of your potential suitor and his or her friends completely hidden. No names, professions or photos are exchanged before the date. Users only receive a time and a location. Smart, right? Grouper’s staff picks the venue and pre-pays the first round of drinks. All you have to do is find two single friends who want in and will come up with $60 between the three of you (Grouper charges $20 a person.)

This is a New York Based idea but something I would like to bring to the North Jersey (it’s not here ..YET). I cannot tell you how many single friends I have that have gone through a shitty divorce, have kids and would love to meet someone in the same realm. There must be 500 people out here who would love to go on a date like this. Sounds fun, you get to meet a lot of new people AND it’s not the same recycled people on Match.com, JDate, etc. Is it?

Grouper has been around 2 years and has expanded from Manhattan to all over the country. Grouper partners with lots of hot places in the local area. In exchange they offer discounts on the groups first round of drinks while Grouper brings them a lot of new foot traffic.

Very smart Michael Waxman! (he is the CEO and brains behind this dating service). Michael dropped out of Yale after his freshman year to create his first tech company. He moved out to San Francisco, had 25 full-time employees—including a cofounder of Airbnb—but unfortunately it didn’t work out. He decided to go back to school, graduated and moved to New York. He was newly single and looking for a way to meet new people without joining a “meetup” or an online dating service. A week later, he launched the first version of Grouper and invited two friends who didn’t know each other. They each brought two friends for the first Grouper two summers ago. It branched out from there, and almost two years later they’ve done tens of thousands of drinks with each other. Michael is currently dating a girl he met on Grouper, bringing things full circle.

My feelings are if you are going to go on a bad date, you may as well experience it with friends and get a laugh afterward OR, who knows, you may even meet Prince Charming. You can “groupergram” your fun night on Instagram!