Jamie Lee, Founder of Flox, Is Using Tech to Bring Friend Groups Together

New York City and college campuses share a similar paradox: despite the sheer number of vibrant, creative, and kind individuals that inhabit both, feelings of loneliness, isolation, and disconnection dominate. Jamie Lee, founder of Flox and formerly CC ’21, is on a mission to disrupt the loneliness epidemic and technologize the friendship-finding process. Her brainchild, Flox, is an app that allows friends to create a group profile together to discover, match, and connect with other groups.

For Jamie, COVID-19 proved pivotal in turning the idea brewing in her head into a fully-fleshed company launching this spring. During the pandemic, she thought seriously about the heightened feeling of isolation, the nature of relationships, and the performance of tech in fostering better ones.

Despite the prevalence of social media platforms, Jamie identified a massive white space in the industry. Existing platforms primarily serve to form romantic connections, but none focused on the “people who could meet without the pressures and expectations of dating,” Jamie pointed out.

This insight was followed by another: Jamie realized that she had always attempted to include her friends in her social media experience, often asking for their opinions on her posts. She explains that this instinct was a knee-jerk reaction to the inauthentic and destructive environments fostered by existing social media platforms: “I was roping my friends into my online experience to ease my social anxiety on these apps from the start. Over time, I found that Instagram and dating apps had become personally toxic.”

Building off of these ideas, Jamie began to imagine a world in which meeting new people online could be both comfortable and fun. This ultimately led to the chief innovation of Flox, a divergence from the siloed and hyper-individual nature of online platforms.

As Jamie summarizes, “I realized that I am my most authentic version of myself around my friends… and that’s how the idea of friends connecting in groups online was born.” After many user interviews, this concept was validated by feedback that “the group model really lends itself to replicating more natural social settings,” Jamie outlined.

Flox’s focus on friend groups, rather than individual profiles, diverges from the traditional dating app model. Additionally, Flox does not serve as as a spin on dating apps, but rather as an elevated group chatting platform that reinvents how users meet and connect. Jamie envisions Flox to be a tool we use to access potential relationships with all of the people who we could be friends with, but currently have no way of meeting.

The idea of authenticity is at the forefront of Flox’s mission. Flox not only strives to provide a better alternative for building friendships online, but also to negate the negative side of social media. Jamie is thinking critically about how to foster “The Flock”: a warm, welcoming, and growing community. To do so, she endeavors to learn from incumbents’ mistakes.

“I think we have experienced the negative effects of scale as today’s social networks have grown over the past decade. We become so obsessed with superficial signals of validation such as swipes, likes, and comments that we’re not connecting in the way that these platforms originally intended,” Jamie reflects.

There seems to be an implicit draw to what Jamie and her team at Flox are creating, especially among the Gen Z community. Prime evidence of this is Flox’s TikTok account, where one of Jamie’s videos hit over 1 million views and drew in over 20k waitlist sign-ups. At Flox, this indicates an early sign of product-market fit and empowers the team to continue their effort to restore authentic online connections.

“It’s impactful to see people emotionally resonating with the product. As a generation, we’ve grown so tired of the current social platforms. It’s time for a change, and I hope to make an impact,” Jamie stated.

The product-founder fit at Flox is likewise a match made in heaven. Right now, Flox is in private beta and Jamie has her attention focused on developing product as well as Flox’s mission. For Jamie, Flox is not just a company, but an effort to solve a problem that has impacted her deeply:

“I knew instantly that I had to solve this problem and became obsessed with it. Building something for my friends and feeling so personally connected to this mission was critical in my decision to take the leap and pursue Flox full-time. I’m so excited to share Flox with the Columbia community soon.”

We cannot wait to see what Jamie will accomplish this Spring with Flox’s launch and beyond.