Making local connection part of everyday life
This is me at a picnic with some awesome neighbors I met through this project.
Hi, I’m Roza
I started this project because I wanted my neighborhood to feel more like a community — familiar faces, grocery store hellos, spontaneous nearby plans, and neighbors who support each other.
It felt strange that we have so many ways to meet people all over the city, but almost none to help us connect with the awesome people right around us. So I’m building what I wish existed: a way to spend less time coordinating and commuting to see people, and more time connecting nearby.
The person two doors down could become one of your closest friends. Someone around the corner has been wishing they had a tennis partner. The neighbor upstairs would happily feed your cat while you’re away. But none of you know that about each other.
We live surrounded by people we don’t know. We share walls, sidewalks, parks, and streets, yet rarely interact.
Modern life has removed many of the conditions that once made local connection happen naturally. We move often. We work remotely. Screens bring information, entertainment, and almost anything we need directly into our homes. And when we want connection, we turn to those same screens to find friends, groups, events, or help.
Strangely, it can be easier to find someone across the city who shares your interests than to discover that the person two doors down does too.
So we coordinate schedules, make plans, and commute across town to spend time with people we found online, while barely knowing the people who live around us.
But we don't lack the desire for local community. We lack the infrastructure for it.
Hey There, Neighbor is an attempt to build that infrastructure: a way to discover that the neighbor you’ve been waving to would actually love to meet you too, that someone around the corner wants to do the same things you do, and that the strangers around us often aren’t so strange after all.
You might find a tennis partner, make a friend, get help moving a couch, or bring an entire neighborhood together.
The point is to make all of those possibilities more likely.
FAQ
How exactly does it work?
Think of Hey There, Neighbor as a modern neighborhood directory designed to help people actually connect.
When you sign up, you add your neighborhood, interests, and the ways you'd like to connect. From there, you can:
- Find people nearby you have things in common with — whether you’re looking for a walking buddy, pickleball partner, book club, fellow parents, someone to trade pet sitting with, or just more familiar faces nearby.
- Start or join local groups around shared interests.
- Get paired for 10-minute neighbor chats — a deliberately short, low-pressure way to say hi to someone you might otherwise only pass on the sidewalk.
The idea is simple: make it much easier to connect with the people already around you.
How is it different from Nextdoor, Bumble BFF, my building’s WhatsApp, etc?
Nextdoor
Nextdoor is largely built around posts and neighborhood information. Hey There, Neighbor is built around meeting people. There’s no endless feed to scroll. The goal is to help you discover neighbors you might like to know and give you an easy way to actually meet them.
Bumble BFF, Timeleft, and other friend-finding apps
Those can introduce you to cool people, but often those people live across town and you will literally never see them again without a full-time project management job. Hey There, Neighbor introduces you to people you can run into again without coordinating plans and commuting across the city. And Hey There, Neighbor is free…
WhatsApp, Facebook groups, Google Groups, building chats, etc.
These are great for broadcasting information to everyone: announcing an event, asking about a lost package, or sharing a neighborhood update. But they’re not very good at helping individual neighbors actually connect. Most things you might want to do with a neighbor (like find a tennis partner, grab coffee, trade pet sitting, meet another parent, start a book club) aren’t things you’d necessarily send to an entire mailing list or group chat. Hey There, Neighbor lets you see who nearby shares your interests, so the right people can discover each other without having to broadcast every idea to the whole neighborhood.
What is a 10-minute neighbor chat?
It’s the easiest way to turn someone who lives nearby from a stranger into a familiar face. You might pass the same neighbors on the sidewalk, in the elevator, or at the grocery store for years without ever having a natural reason to talk. These chats create that reason. Hey There, Neighbor regularly suggests neighbors for you to meet, along with a time that works with both of your schedules. If you’re both up for it, you meet at the local park or coffee shop and say hi for 10 minutes.
The 10 minutes is intentional: it’s long enough to get to know someone a little, but short enough that it doesn’t have to feel like making plans with a stranger. If you hit it off, you can always keep talking or meet again.
And while these chats are a normal part of how Hey There, Neighbor works, there’s never any obligation to meet a particular person—or to do them at all. You can also use the directory, message neighbors, and join groups.