My ex has discovered that spending 10 years living with your best friend easily leads to neglecting friendships, and more specifically neglecting to form new ones. She's currently without a local "best mate" to spontaneously hang out with/share with and misses that. I suspect she'd happily pay $15/mo to join a community of similar folk. But it would need to be physically local, if there's no face to face contact it's pretty pointless. Which means it's "like Meetup, but significantly more expensive"... what's the value proposition?

But I suspect there will be a fair bit of churn if the community works, because quite a few people will use it to find friends rather than maintain friendships. Might be worth building that into your financial plans.

I know my dad never really had any friends. Luckily, he has 6 brothers and they're kind of close, so that's a decent substitute for friends. But only one of them has any friends. My mom has one brother. He never had any friends -- ever, even as a kid.

On the contrast, my mom has tons of friends. Her 3 sisters have WAY more friends than her. My dad's sisters all have tons of friends. My mom's female friends have tons of friends, too.

I personally don't know any older women who don't have friends. Even my Grandma who was 90 when she died had two friends left around her age! I get the irony here, btw -- if they didn't have friends how would I know them?

Anyway, I could see women wanting more connection with women their age. Who doesn't want more friends? But beside one of my uncles, I literally don't know a single man in that age group that has ANY friends -- regardless of age. And even he only has a few friends, and he's genuinely one of the coolest people I know. It's sad.

Sample size of one. I get it. I know you did your research. Just curious to learn more.

My suspicion is: women might just be more receptive to this kind of thing (which is the reason they actually need it less) because they're a lot more social than men. But I'd like to get your input.