Building a business is lonely. It is lonely at the top and lonely at the bottom. The friends you went to school with might not understand the life you have now. Your family might not grasp what you do, or how you make the money you make. Without a circle of other founders to trade ideas and troubles with, you can feel completely alone.

That loneliness reaches far past founders. It runs through adults everywhere, in a world of constant connectivity that somehow leaves people more cut off than before. The founders below noticed it, in their own lives first, and built businesses to do something about it. Their businesses now help people make friends, and keep them. As it turns out, there is serious money in the thing too many adults experience.

Solving adult loneliness: the founders building what people don’t know they need

A seat at a stranger's table

Adult loneliness has crept up in an age of constant messaging and endless swipes, with people losing the knack of connecting in person. Matic Jesenovec's response was to sit strangers down to dinner together. He sells tickets and builds his profile at the same time.

The hard part was getting people through the door. Every instinct, as he puts it, “screams ‘that sounds super awkward.’" Then those strangers started coming back week after week and leaving as friends. Set the table right, and connection stops being a gamble. Jesenovec started attracting referrals for his main business, as did the guests.

Brunch over business cards

Networking usually means cramming 100 people into a room and expecting business to flow after a five-minute chat. Matt Gerlach decided that format was broken after, in his words, "over a million networking events."

So he built The Friday Brunch Club, inviting strangers to his home in Hancock Park for a home-cooked meal and an unusually deep conversation. People told him they had been fundamentally changed by it. Go deeper rather than wider, and a handful of honest conversations does more than a roomful of small talk. Plus, your new friends now understand your business, and become your sales team.

Carly Valancy thought networking had become transactional and performative, even though it remained the most useful thing you can do for your career. She set out to make connection feel generous instead of grabby.

Through Reach Out Party, an app that gamifies and encourages outreach , she watched people in their 30s through their 60s change how they connect, betting on relationships as a lifelong project rather than a job-hunt tactic. "Life really is about who you know, and who you know is up to you," she says. Treat connection as something you tend for decades, and it pays back for just as long.

A night out without the drink

So much of adult social life still revolves around alcohol that those who abstain often have nowhere to go at night. Sam Bail set out to change that, against constant pushback from people insisting a sober event must be boring, and created an alcohol-free nightlife platform in New York City.

Her first sober trivia night proved otherwise. The room was, in her words, "absolutely BUZZING," and since 2022 she has hosted more than 100 events and built a community of 35,000 followers and 6,000 newsletter subscribers, as well as published The Sober Partying Playbook. Build the third place a growing group has been denied, and they will fill it.

Nobody should build alone

IMMA Collective is a membership for experienced people doing serious work entirely on their own, and happy to stay that way. Most groups are focused on scale-chasing startups, but Lilli G saw a gap and built a business on a model drawn from nature: "A forest holds," she says, where a single tree in a storm does not.

Members from Berlin to Brooklyn told her they had not known how much they needed this ecosystem. One closed a $22K project from a single introduction, another generated more than $50K in ongoing work from one connection. She is going slow on purpose, creating it to last.

Making friends as a grown-up

Draymond Washington set out to help adults build genuine community, and tested the idea hard before betting on it as a business. "The hardest part was testing it," he says, having thrown 95 events in a single year first.

The proof was simple and human. "People legit made their best friends," he says. Sometimes the most valuable thing you can give adults is a reliable reason to show up, and a room that makes the rest easy.

A community after the lonely years

Loneliness hit the over-35s hard during COVID, and Lyndsey Clay was feeling it herself. Infertility and divorce had left her, in her words, "socially stranded" in her 40s.

When she shared that openly online, explaining she simply needed new friends, hundreds and then thousands followed. Local businesses offered to sponsor, and what began as a lonely chapter is now a social club and a business club backed by EDF. Talk about your loneliness publicly, and you find out how many people feel exactly the same.

A room for people who work alone

The Good Space, a design-lead co-working space, began because three freelance designers wanted somewhere that did not exist. Amy Walker co-founded it in 2025 to pull independent creatives out of the isolation of working alone.

Building an in-person space takes patience, she says, "a lost art in modern society." The signal came with a fully booked peer-support coworking day and a packed room at a founders' happy hour, all in a small seaside town in Devon. When people ask why there, her answer is "why not?" Isolation reaches small towns too.

Belonging built into the work

Impact Events Collective grew out of a belief Jenny Catalano calls deeply personal, that human connection is one of the most overlooked drivers of culture and business success. She left years of executive roles to build her purpose-driven team experiences.

She saw it land when 150 conference attendees stopped behaving like strangers and started working side by side, assembling 51 toy cars for children in need. The atmosphere, she says, "felt completely different than anything a traditional event experience creates." Give people a shared purpose, and connection follows on its own.

The business of belonging: how founders are turning loneliness into a living

Loneliness runs underneath modern adult life, and founders are among the most affected. Working long hours and riding an emotional roller coaster, surrounded by people who do not quite understand the life. These founders felt it, then built the dinner table, the brunch, the sober night, the community they wished had existed.

The market is enormous, because almost everyone is a customer. Solve the thing people are too embarrassed to admit they need, and you will never run short of demand.