FOR INVESTORS
Pre-seed. Pre-launch.
Building in the open.
No funding raised. No revenue. What exists: a working product, not a mockup — and one open question, which the Warsaw launch is designed to answer fast, before any paid growth. If reliability-as-infrastructure for real-world social coordination is a thesis you're tracking, I'd rather show you the actual product and the research behind it than a projection slide.
Request the deckTHE PROBLEM
Adult loneliness isn't a discovery problem. It's a follow-through problem.
Meetup, Facebook Groups and Bumble BFF already help people find events. The events aren't the problem — half the people who RSVP never show up, so nobody comes back a 2nd or 3rd time, and the acquaintance never becomes a friend.
1 in 6
people worldwide report feeling lonely — World Health Organization
FIRST PRINCIPLES
An RSVP is a promise with no cost to break. That's the whole bug.
Every trust market that actually works fixed this the same way, and it was never "ask people to be more reliable." A credit score didn't make borrowers more honest — it made default visible and priced. eBay and Uber ratings didn't make sellers and drivers nicer — they made bad behavior expensive to hide. Strava didn't make anyone train harder — it made effort, previously invisible, into a number other people could see.
Real-world attendance is the one place that fix was never built. An RSVP has always been free to give and free to break — so on its own it carries almost no information. That's not a motivation problem reminders can nudge. It's a missing layer of infrastructure. Cercle is that layer.
THE MECHANIC
Every "yes" gets scored.
Cancel early — free, no penalty. Sign up and ghost — visible, permanently, on your profile and your club's. It's the one number every member, every organizer, and every club can actually trust.
Join a precise club
Not “Sport” — Gravel, Bouldering, Chess. Precision breeds repeat faces, and repeat faces is what turns strangers into friends.
Show up (or don't)
Attendance is confirmed at the door with a code the host shows in person — not a self-reported checkbox anyone could fake.
Earn the right to host
Reliable members can propose the next outing — hosting stops being a single burned-out admin's job.
WHY NOW
A crowded category. One unclaimed mechanic.
"IRL friend-making" is getting crowded — over a dozen funded entrants since 2025. Generic "make friends" positioning no longer works. But in reviewing Meetup, Timeleft, 222, Luma and every well-funded adjacent player, not one publicly shows members a visible reliability score the way Cercle does. Meetup's closest analog is a private, organizer-only tool. Timeleft and 222 — the best-funded curated-dinner players — have the inverse problem: their own no-show rates are a live complaint in their user reviews.
There's a reason for that gap, and it isn't oversight. Showing a reliability score is uncomfortable — for the user it exposes, and for the platform whose own engagement numbers it would implicate. That discomfort is exactly why it works: the same reason a public credit score functions and a private one wouldn't.
THE MATH, BOTTOM-UP
Top-down TAM reports for this exact category range from $96M to $2.86B depending on vendor — a 10x+ spread that means the niche isn't standardized enough to anchor a pitch to. Built bottom-up instead, from Warsaw's own population data:
The number that actually matters is smaller than either: 150–500 people from that cohort hitting the 3rd-outing return rate. That conversion — not signups — is the entire bet, and it's unproven.
THE METRIC WE'RE BUILDING AROUND
3rd
outing return rate
The point where a connection becomes the start of a friendship — not downloads, not events created. Every product decision at Cercle is judged against whether it moves this number.
PRODUCT DISCIPLINE
What we chose not to build.
Founder
Solo founder. Designed and built the entire product alone before writing a single line of outreach — a production-shaped Expo/React Native app, a Go + Postgres backend with real auth, moderation, and rate limiting, and this site.
THE HONEST RISK
Does a visible score feel like relief — or surveillance?
The entire mechanism depends on the answer, and it isn't known yet. Made visible, reliability could relieve the exact shame organizers already carry — or it could just be a new number to feel anxious about. Every incumbent's silence on this is evidence too: nobody has tested it publicly, so nobody has the answer. That's not a footnote. It's the first thing the Warsaw cohort is built to measure, before a euro goes into growth spend.