Somewhere Good

Dirt is a daily email about entertainment.

Terry Nguyen, Dirt's senior staff writer, interviews Naj Austin, founder and CEO of Somewhere Good.

Last April, a friend invited me to attend the launch party of Somewhere Good, a social app that sought to connect users and cultivate community, at the time, via voice memo. Attendees had to download the app for entry, so I did. Somewhere Good has been on my phone since, although I admittedly wasn’t compelled by its audio-forward premise early on.

It reminded me of Cappuccino, an app for friend groups and families to share audio snippets of their day, which would then be “brewed” into a podcast-like stream for later listening. Based on my old screenshots of its interface, Somewhere Good had daily audio prompts, separated into “worlds” for users to explore, from “Artist Rituals” and “Radical Library” to “Deep Discourse” and “Communal Care.”

Over the past six months, however, I noticed gradual changes to the app. I began receiving notifications to drop by the platform’s community space, located in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn. In the app’s latest iteration, there is a separate tab for in-app “convos” and a feed for IRL, mostly Brooklyn-based events. Users can also opt to directly text Somewhere Good, either to create their own hangouts or to learn about local happenings. Whereas Partiful onboards users via direct invites from their friends, Somewhere Good operates on a broader scope of social engagement: A local might encounter an ad for an SG event on TikTok, or see the SG logo displayed at a coffee shop, and give the app or the chatbot a try.

Somewhere Good had successfully pivoted from audio, a Covid-era social trend, to live, interactive events—a development that is in line with my observations about the “new social.” Still, community remains their core mission, says founder Naj Austin. The Somewhere Good team had just adapted to what users were responding to. In April, I went to the Somewhere Good headquarters at 320 Tompkins Ave to speak with Austin in person.

Our conversation has been edited for clarity.

Terry Nguyen: I first downloaded the app last year, when a friend invited me to Somewhere Good’s launch party in the Lower East Side. I remember then the platform was centered around audio. How has the mission and format of the app changed?

Naj Austin: Our mission has always been about connecting people in a better way. What happened over the last year is that we’ve followed the sort of circular spiral that occurs when you launch a start-up. You try to follow this vision, and in light of all the shape-shifting that has happened with the app, we found ourselves back where we started. Somewhere Good was launched with the intention of bringing people together via voice in this digital world, and users would then meet up with one another off the platform at a Somewhere Good event. That was the ideal scenario. People ended up talking on the app, but used it to mainly meet up, which became a safety concern for us.

At the same time, we were opening up this space in Bed-Stuy. The idea for the space was that the SG team could work here Monday through Thursday, and Friday through Sunday, if you have the app, users can come here and hang out for free. Then, people started to reverse engineer the app. They would meet here and then talk on the app. People wanted to hang out here, socialize, and host events. We’re a really busy and small team, so we had to build something that could facilitate those interactions for us. We jimmied up this chatbot that automatically creates gatherings, which we call “hangouts” and that really took off.

TN: I’ve been subscribed to your mailing list since last April, so I noticed that gradual shift from audio to IRL hosting via Hangouts. But the Hangouts aren’t all located at the SG headquarters, right?

NA: It became this interesting situation where users wanted to have us create a Hangout but at a different neighborhood space, like a coffee shop or a bookstore. And those spaces became interested in Somewhere Good because they don’t have the manpower to manage events or field requests from customers. That wasn’t our intent, but if you looked at what we built with the technology, it was the most responsive and brought in the most revenue. We had this come-to-Jesus moment about six months ago. Like I said, it feels circular. We built a tool that helps community spaces, and we have users who trust us enough to come to Hangouts alone and meet new people.

TN: I like how there are time limitations built into the app, in the sense that it nudges you offline to have the full Somewhere Good experience. Did you try to build that into the chatbot?

NA: We basically built a texting tool that uses AI to generate an event agenda. Say, you’re a first-time host. You’ve never done this before but you want to do something that is related to astrology and painting. You type that into the app and it automatically creates this agenda in a text for you. The bot was actually an internal tool we built, but it turned out people were interested in using it and businesses wanted to pay for it. I never set out to build an AI-assisted chatbot to help people hang out in their city, but it happened pretty organically.

TN: Somewhere Good is very NYC-centric right now. Have you considered expanding to other cities?

NA: We’re actually focused on Brooklyn because we’re doing a boots-on-the-ground effort when it comes to sales. We’re going to spaces and pitching ourselves as this tool that makes event planning easier for them. We’re still figuring out the perfect sales cadence, but we can technically do this anywhere. We’re trying to work with spaces that hate doing events, which almost every single space does. SG provides consistent, reliable, ritualistic foot traffic, which has become harder in a TikTok world, where people go to a place once, take a video, and leave. Our goal is to promote this idea of patrons returning to local spaces, supporting them, and contributing to the betterment of their neighborhood. It’s a market-by-market scenario.

TN: After Covid, I’ve noticed that certain spaces, especially in Brooklyn, began reinventing themselves to be this sort of omnichannel retail, multi-purpose venue. There’s Public Records, Elsewhere, and this new spot called The Red Pavilion. Generally speaking, more places don’t just serve coffee. They also sell merch. They’re not just a wine bar; they have ticketed DJ nights and host open mics. Would you say SG is cultivating something like that?

NA: Our mission is really centered around locality. Sometimes, people haven’t even heard of Somewhere Good. They just walk into a coffee shop or a bookstore and they see the poster, and realize they can host a book club at this venue. The barista or the shopkeeper will tell them to scan the QR code, and then they go down the user journey. Most hangouts are free, whether they’re hosted at the SG space or at a neighborhood venue. But I’ve noticed that when people come here, they want to spend money. I think it’s driven by this desire to preserve a community space. People don’t want this third space they love to go away.

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