Kindred Business · Vancouver
Kindred is a blind-first app for meeting people nearby. On day seven it stops being polite and asks the pair to name a day, a place and a time. Preferred Venues in Vancouver are what it offers at that moment.
Vancouver has a reputation for being hard to make friends in, and the reason usually given is the weather. It is not the weather. It is that outdoor plans need a specific day and an indoor room is what people fall back on when the day is wrong.
A room that works in the rain is worth more here than anywhere else on this list.
Two people who have never met have been talking for a week. Photos unlocked on day three. On day seven the app asks them to settle what, where and when — and neither of them wants to be the one who suggests somewhere wrong.
That is the whole opportunity, and it is a narrow one on purpose. There are no banners in Kindred and there never will be. A venue appears at the moment somebody is choosing a place, and nowhere else in the product.
Somewhere two strangers could comfortably sit and talk for an hour. In practice that means cafés that stay quiet past four, climbing gyms, breweries with seating you can talk in, and small kitchens — the sort of places you already find around Mount Pleasant, Commercial Drive, Kitsilano, Gastown and the West End.
Loud rooms where nobody can hear each other are a bad fit, and we will say so rather than take the money.
Guaranteed traffic in Vancouver or anywhere else. Nobody can promise that and anybody who does is selling you a number. Your dashboard shows how many people opened your listing and how many tickets sold, and if that is zero it says zero.
The honest size of it. Kindred is early, and this page is not going to pretend otherwise. What it is: a product whose entire mechanic is getting people out of the app and into a room, in a defined week, in a defined city. If that describes customers you want, being one of the first Vancouver venues on it costs very little.
Two minutes to apply, no card, and a person checks the business before the listing goes live.