Authentic human connection powers our best work (and lives)
Why we’re building a mobile app at the intersection of social health x future of work
After Groove’s private beta, I’m excited to announce Groove is open to the world today!
We’re thrilled to have partners who believe in our mission, helping us raise $3.5m to date to build Groove.
Over the last 3 years, we all experienced a removal of real human connection, and yet many of us experienced much higher than average productivity during that period. But at what cost? We might have accomplished more, but we felt like we did less.
What is the missing piece? The human connections that drive us in a healthy way to accomplish what matters the most — and fulfill us as a result.
These extremes made us wonder: Is there a best of both worlds option? An alternative that gives us what we need, where we need it and when we need it, to be our best, most productive and happy selves.
Right now, Groove helps accomplish that via on-demand 50-minute small group focus sessions, injecting the perfect mix of social connection, motivation and accountability to your workday.
Groove’s goal is to be the ultimate human-powered support system.
Essentially, we made Groove for ourselves. We’re hooked, and now we want to share it with you.
If you’d like to learn more, in this post, I’m going to reflect on:
- How it all started
- What’s happening in the world?
- Groove’s solution
- Our core philosophies
- Where Groove is heading
🕺Let's Groove! Try the app now How it all started
Scene: It’s 2020. I’m a freelancer, without teammates, struggling to feel connected while working from home. Sruli, my friend (and now cofounder) says to me “I miss working in coffee shops and at WeWork”
This simple thought kicked off everything.
Could we recreate “that”? What were people truly seeking by going to coworking spaces?
Exactly what ‘that’ was, and what exactly we missed wasn’t clear at the time, but my co-founders Sruli, Tova and I were aware that there was something important here to solve, and it wasn’t just us experiencing this.
Having worked in coffee shops and coworking spaces in the past with people around us, we missed the feeling of having a support network and friends around us at work.
As the world was moving to more decentralized ways of living and working, adding freedom and choices where maybe there weren’t before, we also could see something was clearly being lost as well, something very fundamental to us as social creatures.
What’s happening in the world?
We can see through statistics and studies that human beings aren’t meant to thrive alone in our individual houses. There’s more disconnection in our unstructured, remote work lives:
- U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy declared a “loneliness epidemic”
- It’s proven that “weak ties” lead to better wellbeing
- Scrolling on social media leads to worse mental health
At the same time, technology and the shift to remote work have enabled greater freedom of choice, allowing more people to start their own businesses, break away from corporate jobs that didn’t fulfill them, and use their time differently in search of greater work-life harmony:
- There are 25 million solo businesses in the U.S. alone
- Across generations, people want more flexibility, autonomy and purpose in their work
- The four day work week has risen in popularity
How could we help people following their own wavy career and life paths thrive — feeling socially connected and motivated to accomplish great things?
We have a lot of software helping us operationally in our remote lives (and an emerging ecosystem for solo workers), but we’re missing a large piece of human infrastructure — whether you work for yourself, a small company, or a large enterprise.
We believe that meaningful connection, whether from weak ties or close friends, creates belonging, providing support to help people thrive day in and day out.
Social health is a relatively new category that we’re excited to contribute to. It’s our ability to interact and form meaningful relationships with others. Social health is core to our emotional wellbeing and feeling supported in our everyday lives.
Social health comes from the social rituals that are integrated into your day.
Think back to the coffee station, the time before or after meetings, the water cooler, grabbing lunch with coworkers and friends, going to your yoga class.
Finding time that is part social and part purposeful is critically important.
But we’re all busy and overwhelmed — is there a way to seamlessly integrate social connection into our workflow, without it becoming another obligation on our to-do list?
A supportive and fun connection that leads to people living their best lives, accomplishing their goals, feeling great about the journey there and having fun along the way.
Is there a way to easily have fun and accomplish our goals, no matter what corner of the globe you’re in?
Enter: Groove’s solution
Finding an answer to these questions is driving us to build the ultimate human-powered support system for people to thrive in life.
Support can look like a lot of different things:
Masterminds / Coaches / Therapists / A call to your mom / Group texts / Slack networking groups
Social connection can look like a lot of different things:
Hanging with friends / Virtual coffee dates / Saying hi to your barista / Engaging on Discord / Social media (maybe?)
Accountability can look like a lot of different things:
Fitness apps like Strava / Productivity tools and timers / Project management software / Check-ins with your client or manager
Bringing all of these together at the push of a button creates something unique:
Groove
Our core philosophies
We believe authentic human connection powers our best work (and lives).
To thrive and accomplish great things, we need:
- Intention: We believe being intentional with our time and energy is a key to a fulfilling life.
- Structure: We need structure, but it must be fluid structure that helps us be more effective in fluid ways.
- Community: We believe life is better together.
Where Groove is today
We are thrilled that we have partners that believe in our mission, and to date, have raised $3.5 million in funding from Mike Hirshland of Resolute Ventures, Verissimo Ventures, FullCircle, 27V, Fresh Ventures, Overton Venture Capital, Bullet Ventures alongside an incredibly supportive and aligned group of angel investors including, Clark Valberg (founder of inVision), Ben Lang (Head of Community, Notion), Roni Behar (Cofounder & CEO, Nabr & Prev. Vice Chairman, WeWork) Hans Rauffaf (Cofounder, Clue), Michael Stoppelman (Prev SVP Eng, Yelp) and Nick Greenfield (Cofounder & CEO, Candid), Dave Pell, Nick & Toby from AUFI, Sammy Rubin (Cofounder & CEO, YuLife), Tom Adeyoola (Prev Cofounder, Metail) & Haleli Barath.
A group of partners who deeply believe in the value for individuals and companies that can be unlocked by this new important piece of infrastructure.
The funding will transform our private beta into a full-scale product offering, at the intersection of social, wellness, community, and operational infrastructure and allow us to integrate Groove into hundreds of thousands of lives of remote workers.
So far, we have a small group of Groovers who love the workplace we have built for them.
Over 1,200 beta users from six continents who average over 9 hours per week Grooving (with our top users spending over 50 hours per week on the app). To date, our community has completed over 42,000 Grooves (or used 2.2 million minutes accomplishing goals together).
We have brought together a mission-driven team that is deeply compelled by the opportunity and feel most grateful to these individuals who are committing their time to bring Groove to the world.
Current product
Groove is a mobile app connecting solo workers for on demand social focus sessions.
Here’s how it works in 60 seconds:
Groove has become a meaningful third place in users' lives that is more needed than ever.
Who’s it for?
Groove is a support community for dreamers, doers, movers and shakers. Perfect for people who work for or by themselves, work-from-homers, hybrid workers, freelancers, entrepreneurs, content creators, and others who would like more social interaction and focus in their work day.
It’s been so magical to see people also use it for intentionally setting aside time for knitting, practicing music, taking an afternoon walk, journaling or learning.
Where are we going?
As we evolve the product into something that can effectively service tens of millions of users one day, we’ll be exploring:
- Team and community tooling: Building dedicated solutions for existing communities and teams, not just individuals.
- Support beyond the core Groove: In this journey to build the ultimate human-powered support system, right now, we’re mostly supporting each other in the Groove. There are many ways we can support each other around the Groove, such as through a social feed, groups, or sharing accomplishments.
- Smarter Networks: We’re committed to making sure everyone has the right people around them that will help them perform best, feel supported and have fun. We want to help you find those people even more seamlessly.
- Evolving Groove sessions (Beyond the core ritual of 50 minutes with a small group): Over time, we want to build experiences that help people do an even better job at accomplishing what they want to accomplish. These could look like task-specific Grooves, solo Grooves, learning Grooves, fitness Grooves and more.
- Leveraging data insights: Helping people understand how they work best and supporting them doing that. We are learning a lot about when people perform best, who they perform best with, how long tasks take — all learnings that can help people use their time most intentionally.
Indulge us as we use a metaphor — right now, we’re really good at helping people run sprints when it comes to accomplishing their short-term goals. What we ultimately want to do is help people build the ability to run marathons in their lives, all while having fun and connecting with others.
Let’s do this!
Get involved:
- I invite you to try Grooving.
- We are hiring a full-stack engineer.
- If you believe that human connection is the key to the future of working and living, then check out more on our Medium.
- We love to hear about interesting applications of Groove to support you working alone, in teams or in communities.
You can always reach out to me directly at josh@groove.ooo.
Thank you to our founding users, team, and partners,
Josh
Cofounder & CEO, Groove
