Off-platform meeting

Off-platform meeting means: two members matched on Are We Friends?, then met in person somewhere outside the app. Coffee, dinner, a walk, a concert, anything where they're physically together and the app isn't part of the activity.

This is our north-star metric. Every product decision runs through the filter "does this increase off-platform meetings per active user per week?" — if no, we don't ship it. Engagement that doesn't lead to meetings is a vanity metric here, not a success.

We track this with a mix of self-report ("Did you meet up?" prompts after a hang plan), opt-in calendar corroboration on paid tiers (you authorize Friends? to verify a calendar event matches the proposed hang), and aggregate signals like DM patterns that correlate with confirmed meetings. We don't read DM contents — we can't, they're end-to-end encrypted — only thread-level metadata like "did messages stop suddenly around the proposed time?".

Most friendship apps optimize for matches, dwell time, or RSVPs. None of those map to actual friendship. We picked the metric that does, even though it's harder to grow on.