TAIPEI (Taiwan News) — Over the past six years, Taiwanese social media app Eatgether has helped over one million users host social gatherings, helping people not only find romantic relationships but also make friends.

Cofounder Mask Wu (吳崟睿) told the Startup Island TAIWAN Podcast that he was inspired to create the app while studying architecture. “Architecture is a discipline that studies the relationship between society and culture,” Wu said, adding this relationship inspired him to create a solution to a common social problem.

Wu said the app began as a social experiment to see if people would be willing to meet up with strangers for platonic social interactions. He was shocked when over 20,000 people signed up in the first two months, revealing that existing social media apps had not yet found a way to meet a core human need: to make friends.

“We want to meet people’s needs for any kind of social behavior,” Wu said. Most people believe social apps like Eatgether are only for romance, but this is not the case, he said. 

Eatgether lists meetup requests for activities such as KTV, mountain biking, sharing meals, train journeys, watching movies, cooking classes, and playing board games. Wu said that users need to build mutual trust in order for these meetups to happen. 

“We are probably the only social service that has a public review system, like Uber,” Wu said, adding that users can give feedback on their meetups that is visible to all. Wu said, “This provides users with a strong source of security, and therefore, the activity of female users on our platform is higher than male users, and that is very unique on social or dating services." 

Wu predicts that services like Eatgether will be the future of social media. “After these 10 years of Facebook, what we finally know is that what people need is not likes. It is real relationships… I think creating a real connection and real happiness will be the next social innovation to meet human beings’ needs.”

“Real things make you happier,” Wu said, “so just focus on real things.”