Why I built Sonderful
My life has had a lot of ups and downs.
There were the great moments... like adventuring in over 25 countries, winning dream jobs I never thought I could get, and weeping with joy when each of my daughters was born.
And there were the not-so-good ones... like feeling totally alone after moving to a new city, crying after work because I felt like I was failing at that new dream job, and watching family and friends get sick or pass away far too young.
Looking back, each of those moments mattered on its own. But what really shaped them wasn't the moments themselves. It was who I had around me when they happened.
The right friend, at the right time
“Too often we underestimate the power of a touch, a smile, a kind word, a listening ear, an honest compliment, or the smallest act of caring, all of which have the potential to turn a life around.”
When I had the right close friend — available, nearby, actually mine — everything changed shape. The highs got higher. The lows got a little easier.
It felt different having someone there to cheer me on, give advice, offer a shoulder to lean on and, most importantly, just listen — so I didn't have to hold my innermost thoughts inside.
They didn't change what happened, and they didn't fix anything. I just wasn't doing it alone.
But if I'm honest, I didn't always have that person when I needed them.
Not because I lacked friends, or because my friends were bad. I had plenty of great ones. It's that friendship isn't one-size-fits-all. You can't call your fantasy football buddy for a deep conversation about grief (trust me, I've tried, and it didn't go well). And the friend who's perfect for career venting isn't always the one who can sit with you through a loss.
No single person can be everything to someone. It's not a character flaw — it's just human.
Yet even when I did have the right friend, sometimes the logistics didn't cooperate. One of my best friends — who I've known since elementary school and can tell literally anything — lives across the border. Two-hour flight. Eight-hour drive. He's always a phone call away, but when what I really want is to sit across from someone and let it all out, that's a little impractical.
Whatever the reason, when I needed — or even just really wanted — a close friend nearby, and that person wasn't there, I'll just say it: it was lonely, and it sucked.
The strange scarcity of big cities
“Loneliness is not the physical absence of other people, but the feeling that you don't share anything meaningful with anyone else.”
I've spent my whole adult life in cities with millions of people — New York, Philadelphia, Chicago, and now Toronto. When I didn't have the close friend I needed, I'd think about how somewhere out there, probably within a few subway stops, was someone who'd make an incredible friend. Heck, I'd probably passed them on the street earlier that day. I just had no way to know who they were, or how to find them.
Sure, I could have walked up to strangers and asked "will you be my friend?" But nobody has pulled that off smoothly since they were eight, and I wasn't about to be the first.
So I did what adults do: hobbies. And I met genuinely cool people that way. But liking the same things doesn't make someone your person. The leap from "oh, you like art? I love art" to "my partner's in the hospital and I'm a wreck, can you just listen?" is a big one, and it doesn't always land. And when it doesn't, you don't just miss out on what you needed — now it's weird, too. Sometimes it really is better to keep it light and just go look at some paintings.
Other times I'd meet someone who'd obviously make a wonderful friend, but — exactly like dating — they weren't in the market. Their people were already in place, their capacity full. Except this time, there wasn't even room in the 'friend zone'.
As I learned countless times, making friends as an adult just isn't all that easy.
Turns out, it wasn't just me
“Friendship is born at that moment when one person says to another: 'What! You too? I thought I was the only one.'”
Once I got open enough to say all this out loud, I found out I was nowhere near alone in sometimes feeling alone (how meta!). Every adult had a version of it. "Adult friending is hard." "My best friends all live far away now." "I don't even know where I'd meet someone new." "My partner only talks to me about their deep stuff, and I think that's a problem." Oof.
So, being a nerd, I went and learned more about social psychology. It turns out the conditions that produce close friendship are fairly specific — proximity, repeat contact, shared values, similar life stages, compatible social styles, and both people actually wanting it. School serves most of these up on a platter. Adult life quietly takes almost all of them away.
And most products built for meeting new people optimize for one of the things that matters least: shared interests. Sure, interests are a fine icebreaker. They are not what makes a friendship deep enough to call at 11pm.
I kept wondering how to get the right people together, under the right conditions, for something good to happen.
So I built 'the venue'
“Each friend represents a world in us, a world possibly not born until they arrive, and it is only by this meeting that a new world is born.”
All that reading and reflecting led me to one big conclusion. When it comes to making new close friends, it's not that adults aren't trying. It's that we don't have a venue.
Adult friending is hard enough on its own. It's so much harder when there's nowhere designed around what actually makes friendships form. So, I decided to try to fix that — and that's why I built Sonderful: a platform built around factors that genuinely tie to close friendship, for people who are actually looking for new close friends right now. And I gave Sonderful three core missions:
- 1Spark human connections that actually change lives. Not more Instagram followers. Not casual acquaintances. People who can genuinely be there for each other when it matters.
- 2Make this normal to talk about. Sharing my story — and eventually the community's — so adult loneliness stops being the thing everyone feels and nobody says. Let's get real.
- 3Put money back into the neighbourhood. Sonderful is about helping people make friends, but we also want to be a good friend to the community. That's why groups meet at local businesses, on purpose.
You can read all about how Sonderful works here. But in short: Sonderful brings small, compatible groups together at local spots — a low-pressure, fun way to meet people who could actually become close friends.
“It's the relationship that heals.”
If any of this sounds familiar — if you've had good friends but not the right friend for the moment you were in, if you've felt that strange loneliness of being surrounded by millions of people — Sonderful was built for you.
Let's make adult friending less hard. And a lot more fun.
Where neighbours meet to become good friends.