Why we started this

The reason LikeMinded exists.

I’m Dan. For a long time, the best part of my week was a walk I nearly didn’t go on.

It’s an easy thing to let slide. Work’s tiring, the sofa’s right there, and it’s genuinely hard to make plans with people once you’re not at school or thrown together by a job anymore. I know I’m not the only one who’s noticed how much of an evening can disappear into a phone without ever quite deciding to let it.

My brother Josh and I started walking together most weekends — him in South Devon, me up here in North Somerset — and after a while other people started coming too. What stuck with me wasn’t the walking itself. It was watching someone arrive for their first one.

There’s a specific kind of nervous a person gets, stood at a car park not quite sure which group is theirs. The moment that changes is small — someone says their name, asks if they found it alright, tells them where to stand. That’s it. That’s the whole trick. But it’s the difference between someone coming back next month and someone never trying again.

That’s really the seed of everything we’re building. Not an app that wants your attention — one that spends as little of it as possible, and spends what it does get making sure nobody has to have that car park moment alone.