Why Butter Hit 10k Users in Months And What It Says About the Loneliness Epidemic

How Sam Richardson did it: Why Butter Hit 10k Users in Months And What It Says About the Loneliness Epidemic

Sam moved a lot from his late teens up until his mid-20s — six cities in all. Every time, he'd start from scratch, rebuild a community, build a social life, and then have to up and move again. He found that consistent change and consistent rebuilding really frustrating, especially at a time of life when values, priorities and goals were changing quickly. He tried Bumble for Friends and Meetup and the other alternatives in the market, but they didn't fit into his lifestyle or make it easy to build authentic connections.

Butter is the app to hang out with new friends: it helps young adults find and build friendships by connecting over social plans — think weeknight dinners, going for a run, grabbing a coffee. The tagline is "invent yourself." Sam doesn't want it to be a friendship app; he frames it as a lifestyle companion where you can create the life you want and become the person you want through connection. It's built around frequency and proximity of connection by meeting over the things you already love doing.

This wasn't Sam's first attempt in the social app space. He'd previously tried to build a couple's friendship app — a web platform, which he now calls insane as a use case — and never got to the point of launching. He spent a ridiculous amount of money engaging developers, the target market was tiny, and the need wasn't quite right. The lesson he carried into Butter was to ship faster and just get something into the market to see if it works, rather than spending all his time getting the product right.

Before writing a single line of code, Sam did secondary research, then put out a TikTok video when he had about a hundred followers — just him talking to camera, asking for 15 minutes of people's time to talk about disconnection, friendship and community. That led to about 100 interviews over the phone, over coffee and online, which gave him the depth of research to understand how people were thinking about the problem — including how differently men and women view disconnection. He bootstrapped Butter as a solo founder, taught himself to code, designed the product, built the website and brand and logo himself, and launched with $500 to spend on going live.

When it came time to ship, the call was more gut feel than metrics: did the app let someone create and post a plan and have it shown to the right people so guests could join? Yes — so get it to market. He launched the MVP just to Melbourne, and specifically to the soberish community there, to prove one core hypothesis: will people post plans on the internet that they want to do with strangers in person? They did. Now in his 30s, with Butter a bit over a year live and a vision to power the "offline internet," Sam wants every in-person interaction to be built on Butter.

What you'll hear

• Why he built Butter — six city moves, rebuilding a social life every time, and trying Bumble for Friends and Meetup before building his own
• The couple's app that never launched — a web platform with a tiny target market that taught him to ship faster
• Testing demand before code — a TikTok video at ~100 followers that turned into about 100 interviews
• How men and women differ on disconnection — why women are more open about it, like dating apps a decade ago
• Bootstrapping with $500 — solo founder, self-taught coding, outsourced dev, and a hard organic push
• The soberish Melbourne launch — picking one narrow audience to prove people would post plans
• The non-technical founder's superpower — why distribution and brand are the edge in B2C

Key claims from this episode

Chapters

Quotes from this episode

Themes Sam returns to

• Ship fast, then iterate — the lesson from the couple's app that never launched: get something into the market instead of perfecting it
• Distribution is the game — for B2C, a commercial and brand-oriented founder has the upper hand because building isn't enough if no one hears about it
• Be scrappy — solo, low on cash, teaching yourself to code and design and just figuring everything out
• Narrow first — launching to one specific audience (the soberish community in Melbourne) to prove the core hypothesis
• Connection takes effort — making and keeping friends, and choosing a partner, both come down to concerted, deliberate effort