A group of us friends were hanging out when two of them found out they'd lived in the same neighborhood years earlier before they'd ever met. “Ever go to that bar?” “All the time!” “You guys probably stood right next to each other at that bar a few times. What if there was an app that could tell you that?” Justin: “That would be incredible. It should be called Proximity.”
The next morning I text Justin one word:
We started brainstorming. Crossed Paths was the seed — everything else came from asking one question over and over: what else should location do for you and your people? We wrote the list. Then we built it.
We realized that the friends you see are the friends you keep.
Presence is what keeps a friendship alive — not the feed, not the likes. The people you stay close to are the people you stay near. So we built a map of the people you love: who's around, when your paths cross, how to close the last two hundred feet. Not to watch each other. To reach each other.
“I'm private about my location.” Perfect. So is this.
It's the part everyone else gets wrong about location sharing.
Good — neither do we. That's why Nearby exists. Most of your friends never see your location — they see proximity: you're close, not where. And then it happens to you: the friend who was at your gate at the same airport. The concert you both stood in. The vacation city you overlapped in for two days and found out three weeks later on Instagram. You didn't need their exact location. You needed one word: near.
You pick per friend. Most people never leave Nearby.