If you're looking to avoid the same Friday night routine with the same friends, a new Chicago app might be for you.
Meet Entourage, a social networking app that aims to expand your social circle by introducing you and your friends to other groups on the app.
The young app is starting to take off in New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago — where co-founders Edgar Friloux and Alexander Clifford said they're focusing the majority of their marketing efforts to get college-aged users to turn the app into a centerpiece of their social lives.
“The bottom line is that Entourage seeks to make meeting new people more of a team effort than an individual effort,” Clifford said.
Entourage works like many other group messaging apps: once you’ve downloaded it, it syncs with your contacts in Facebook and on your iPhone to invite your friends into a group. Once a group is built, you can browse nearby groups, swiping left and right until a match is made, triggering a giant group chat for all involved.
From there, you can chat and mingle and — if the group hits it off — make plans to meet up IRL.
Unlike other apps, Friloux and Clifford said, Entourage offers its users the ability to start sidebar chats to speak with your own group, allowing side conversations to take place alongside the longer message chain.
The edge the app has on other, one-on-one communication or dating apps, Friloux said, is that (because group settings are typically more comfortable) many users are far less hesitant to actually get up to go meet someone they have have a real connection with.
“It’s translating what happens in real life. Unlike a one-on-one matching system, I’m going to a bar with two of my best friends. We’re going to meet two to three girls and hit it off there. That’s how connections work,” Friloux said.
And although Chicago isn't exactly known for sexier, B2C apps of Entourage's make and model, Friloux and Clifford still said Chicago was a great place to launch their efforts.
“We see a lot of very tight-knit communities in Chicago, and we think it’s the perfect opportunity for something like this to grow,” Friloux said.
Entourage is currently available for download in the iOS store.
Images via Entourage.
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