30-year-old takes on loneliness crisis with a social networking app that’s already raised $646,000

Nicola Gunby, a 30-year-old entrepreneur, longed for a community of friends when she moved to London after the pandemic, but was shocked to find herself isolated in one of the biggest cities in the world.

Gunby, the co-founder of social and community networking app Cliq, hails from Nottingham in the U.K. and settled in London with her partner Jason Iliffe in 2021 after a stint in Australia.

Gunby and Iliffe were expecting to become embedded in the city’s social scene but soon found that meeting people was a struggle.

“How can you be in a city of millions of people but struggle to find true connection?” Gunby said. “It felt really impossible.”

Gunby tried everything. She attended networking events for female founders but found them too corporate. She even turned to apps like Bumble BFF, which she found to be “super transactional,” while Facebook groups were “so outdated.”

Gunby and IIiffe soon realized that the issue was far bigger than themselves and started musing over the idea of a social networking platform that brought people together in real life.

After drawing up some plans, they hired an app agency to build the barebones of an app and trialed it at universities.

Cliq, which was founded in February 2023, is described as an antidote to stereotypical social media platforms. Users can join communities focused on their interests and hobbies which can range from running, reading, Pilates, and faith-based groups.

The purpose of the communities is to arrange events so users can meet up in person and kindle friendships.

“It’s just making it easy to meet people in an authentic way … and teaching people to put their phone down, which is very difficult in this day and age when our screen time is so high and we’re so addicted to our phones,” said Gunby.

Since its launch, Cliq has raised £528,900 ($646,000) in funding and built a base of 100,000 users worldwide, with the U.S., Australia and Bali its main markets outside of the U.K.

The creation of Cliq comes as people search for connections amid what’s been described as a “loneliness epidemic.”

Gallup’s global loneliness poll, which collected data in 2023, showed that one in five people surveyed worldwide felt lonely “a lot of the day.” The same demographic of people were more likely to say that they felt anger or physical pain.

U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy’s 2023 report “Our Epidemic of Loneliness and Isolation” highlighted that loneliness is becoming a growing issue across generations and is a great risk to physical health contributing to things like dementia, stroke, or even premature death.

“It’s 100% a global issue,” Gunby explained. “The pandemic made us a lot more introverted as people … I think it made a lot of people a little bit scared to socialize again.

“That’s coming out of the works now, and people are wanting that in real life, connection,” she added.

The loneliness issue has also been exacerbated by technology and social media, according to Gunby.

“We feel so connected through our phones that we can see what our friends or influencers are doing constantly, but many of these people we don’t actually see, so we feel like we’re connected on the surface level, but when we look deeper down, we’re actually really not,” she said.

“The loneliness crisis is going up and up and up, and so many people are looking for connection, but none of the apps are doing anything to solve this.”

U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy recently told “The Oprah Podcast” that one solution to loneliness is not to focus more on ourselves, but to pay attention to the world outside us by investing in three things: relationships, service and community.

“When we focus on connecting to something bigger than ourselves, that’s actually when we find joy,” he told Oprah Winfrey in a January episode of her podcast.

Gunby said the reason why Cliq works is because its communities operate around a shared interest and purpose. She described a distinction between social networking apps and social media apps.

A social networking app is less about consuming content and more about connecting with friends, Gunby said, citing the old days of Facebook as an example of this.

“The younger generation, and we speak to a lot of them … they’ve never really experienced what a true social network is,” she said. “Every single platform since then has been social media, so Instagram, TikTok, for example. We’re just sat consuming. We’re scrolling. We’re addicted to our phones.”

“We’re not actually socializing with anyone, and it’s taking away that face-to-face interaction,” she added.

Cliq, she said, is the middle ground between the “nice, social media feel,” and making it easy to meet people.

“That’s why we wanted to create a hybrid model of: you connect with people online before you connect offline,” she said.

She pointed out that social events can often be difficult for more introverted personalities and it can be awkward to strike up a conversation with a random person when you have nothing in common. With Cliq, the activity is the common interest, she added.

“So you go to a run club as a social, maybe you’re really shy and you don’t want to open up, but you could talk about the run. You go to a book club. Maybe I don’t want to speak about myself, but you talk about the book,” Gunby said.

“If you’ve got that common interest with someone, or you’ve done that activity, or it’s the community’s focus around something, you have something to open with.”