Genius Makes A Tinder-Style App For Mom Friends

Finding female friends is hard, especially when you’re a busy mom. Enter a Tinder-style app to help facilitate friendships between women.

Being an adult is hard. Being a woman is really hard. There is so much to it that you don’t understand until it’s happening to you and one of those things is how tough it is to make friends with other women. Without the commonality of school or college to bind you, it can be incredibly difficult to find like-minded girlfriends at various stages. But have no fear — a new app is here to help us make those connections so we can find friends no matter where we’re at in life.

The Hey! VINA app was created with women in mind who are looking for platonic friendship with other women — for any reason. Co-founder and CEO Oliva June Poole tells Fast Company, “We built this app to solve for our own needs as women who have moved, traveled, changed careers, and shifted lifestyles and life stages. Through our adult lives we go a lot of places that our existing friendships don’t always support and it becomes time to expand our circles.”

Poole further explains that the idea came to her after moving to San Francisco by herself seven years ago. She didn’t know anyone in her new city and decided to use the OkCupid dating app to find female friends after it proved to not work out so well for romantic ones. She says it was a bit awkward sometimes when messaging women trying to be “just friends”, but quickly found others doing the same thing. That’s when her genius idea was born.

The app requires the user to connect with their Facebook account, which confirms both identity and that the user is, in fact, a woman. After that, the user takes a brief quiz to determine a few key points of interest to help find friends they may click with. If two users swipe right on each other, they’re then able to chat and decide whether to meet up.

Poole says, “We hope women find their new best friends, traveling partners, brunch dates, wing girls, mommy friends, workout partners, etc. on the platform. The goal is for the app to work as an introduction tool, an easy way to step into a new place or new part of your life and easily find new friends who are similar to you.”

And can we get an AMEN? How many of us have wanted to find new “mom” friends or someone to hit the gym or grab a coffee with but had no idea where to start? I know I’ve been there. Right after getting married, we moved to a new city an hour from everyone we knew. I could still see my old friends sometimes but I needed local friends as well.

Joining a playgroup after my daughter was born helped some, but beyond our same-aged babies, I found I had little in common with most of the moms. Probably because simply having kids the same age is not enough to sustain a friendship for very long. An app like this would be amazing for moms to find women they have things in common with other than having had children.

Hey! VINA is available starting today in New York City and San Francisco with plans to add more cities soon. And to that we say, hurry up! It’s not easy making female friends and a little bit of help would be a wonderful thing.