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Howbout replaces the endless coordination loop with a shared calendar of spontaneous plans – $13M raised to make offline meetups as frictionless as a like.
ENTRY ANGLES
Calendar sharing for event coordination · Short-video based venue discovery · User-generated event creation tools
VERTICALS
CAPABILITIES
Frictionless coordination and planning UX, Venue discovery and curation, Community and social graph management
Howbout is "like the hot, popular sibling of Google Calendar that everyone wants to hang out with" More precisely, it's a social planning tool for organizing and discovering offline meet-ups with friends and acquaintances.
The current alternative is a familiar chain: text someone "what are you up to?" and wait, hoping they happen to be free at exactly the same moment. It's the modern equivalent of sending a letter and hoping for the best.
With Howbout, you log your plans into a calendar – a bar you're heading to Wednesday evening, a late-night karaoke run over the weekend, whatever's on your radar.
Friends you've connected with in the app can see your schedule automatically. You see theirs. The result: everyone in your social circle can see when paths might cross without anyone having to coordinate. Or you can send specific invitations and get back "I'll be there," "Maybe," or "Busy."
Most people have different social circles that rarely overlap. The app lets you create groups for each, so you can send one invitation to the whole crew rather than chasing individuals. Each group gets a shared calendar. You can also run polls to settle on the best time and place for the next hangout.
Every event and group automatically gets its own chat for logistics: confirming the address, sending a "running late" update, asking a quick question.
The home screen shows your upcoming week at a glance – your own plans, friends' plans, and open invitations all in one view.
Past events stick around too. If you ever want to look back and confirm you had a social life, the history is there.
Howbout is four years old, runs with 13 people, and has reached 4 million monthly active users. The strongest user base is in the US, followed by the UK, Germany, Australia, and Canada.
The company has tested several monetization approaches – advertising, paid subscriptions – but hasn't committed to one yet, prioritizing growth above all else.
Despite the open monetization question, Howbout just raised $8M – more than the total $5M it had raised across all previous rounds combined over its first four years.
Apps like this only have an audience if the underlying desire is real. It is, and it's getting stronger.
In late 2022, when Howbout closed its previous round, the app had 500,000 downloads and 3 million created events after two years. Now, two years later, it has 4 million monthly active users and 50 million created events. The growth rate is visibly exponential – you don't need a chart to see it.
The driver: digital life is eroding real human connection. The result is what one startup called the defining social fact of the moment – Gen Z is the loneliest generation in human history, and they're starting to push back.
That quote came from POSH ([covered here](/review/pojdjom-potusuemsja)), which built a platform for organizing offline events – from small friend group meetups to creator-fan events to neighborhood gatherings. POSH's usage tripled in the past year alone. In July, they raised $22M – several times more than the $9M raised across multiple rounds in their first four years.
POSH is also now adding social discovery features to its app: users can see which events their friends plan to attend, creating natural opportunities to show up at the same place.
Atmosfy ([reviewed here](/review/giganty-pokazali-nam-sposob-zarabotat)) built a short-video platform for restaurant and venue discovery. They've recently added a social activity feed and a map showing where your friends are right now – so you can join them in real time. Atmosfy raised $12M in fresh funding, bringing total investment to $23M.
This wave of offline socialization apps is a post-pandemic trend driven by Gen Z's desire to actually meet people again.
But what this generation wants is distinct from previous generations' socializing norms. They don't want to schedule formal get-togethers. They don't want to work for it. They want things to happen organically – in the flow of what they're already doing. Here's where I'm going. Here's where my friends are going. Great, let's end up in the same place. No extra effort required. That's exactly the Howbout model.
Saturn ([reviewed here](/review/sledujushhij-fejsbuk)) applied the same principle to students. The app pulls in official course schedules from schools, colleges, and universities, with student clubs and teams adding their activity calendars. Each student builds their personal schedule from these sources, shares it with friends, and everyone can see when they're in the same place at the same time – making serendipitous hangouts a natural byproduct of the existing school day. Saturn raised $44M in a single round in 2021, though major news out of the company has been quiet since.
The direction: offline socialization apps for Gen Z. The design constraints that matter:
- The occasions have to feel worth leaving home for.
- Coordination has to require almost no effort – fitting into the natural rhythm of existing plans.
Each startup discussed today has something worth borrowing. Howbout's calendar sharing. Atmosfy's short-video venue discovery. POSH's own-event creation tools. Saturn's community-first, institution-anchored focus. The challenge is taking the right proportions of each, combining them without making a mess, and shipping something that feels effortless rather than overbuilt.
But the direction is real and growing fast. Facebook's original rise was built on making real-world relationships virtual. The inverse bet – helping a generation that grew up online find its way back to physical presence – has a genuine shot at producing the next social platform at scale.