Introduction

Art and science - as expressions of fundamental human creativity and curiosity - need no justification, whereas the value of business and engineering is determined entirely in relation to the problems they solve. Every startup must find their product-market fit, i.e. the groups of people or other businesses willing to pay them enough for having solved some important-enough problem of theirs in order for the business to sustain itself. Hence, this is the single most important and surprisingly often unexpectedly difficult question for any startup to address.

The question of the specific problem is not trivial for us here at Miitti either. This is not because of the difficulty to come up with one. On the contrary, the problems we are addressing are so multifaceted that it can be difficult to compress into a reasonable number of words. In essence, however, the root cause can be traced to the majority of social interaction moving from real life to the realm of the digital, which leads to information simultaneously being lost, corrupted, polluted, overwhelmed, underdeveloped and overemphasized. First, second and third degree side effects include miscommunication, misrepresentation, impersonal interactions, lack of close connections, siloing, polarization, social fragmentation, loss of local community, isolation, loneliness, withdrawal and disengagement, all of which can make it more difficult to find friends and build and maintain active local communities - which often matter the most in terms of well-being and sense of purpose.

Addressing these different dimensions and nuances can lead to very different-looking solutions. The purpose of this text is then to explore the problems we aim to tackle, why our solution is a good approach and what my personal motivation is for doing so. Kristoffer’s and Aleksi’s - our two other Co-Founder’s - similar texts can be read here and here respectively.

Who am I?

I am Miro Keimiöniemi, the CTO of Miitti Software Oy and currently our sole developer. I study data science in Aalto University with a minor in digital fabrication and I have always known myself to be destined for entrepreneurship, which I wanted to do through engineering of one sort or the other as to me, that is the most honest and undeniable way to contribute something new and truly valuable. In preparation for this, I have already built a somewhat extensive portfolio of software and hardware proof-of-concept prototypes especially around healthier lifestyles and social interaction, some of which can be seen here, along with valuable work experience from varied roles in very different companies such as Nokia and Sensotrend.

Motivation

With Miitti, the time to start that entrepreneurial career finally came. I had long had a similar idea before joining and thus judged it finally ripe when hearing of Miitti for the first time in January 2024. In fact, most people I have talked with about us have had a more or less similar idea or desire for such, strongly signaling of its time having truly come.

For me personally the idea started as a platform for finding the active local parkour scene by way of training spots on a map and activity statuses indicating if anyone is currently training at one, but eventually evolved to encompass first all sports and finally all microevents - also known as “miitti”s in spoken Finnish - anywhere from going for coffee, drinks, coworking, board games or bar crawls with friends to attending festivals and concerts with strangers or finding people to volunteer, jam or have a language exchange with. Reflecting on the common thread through all of these I discovered that my attraction to the idea stems from the desire to bring the majority of social interaction back from social media to the real, physical world once again in a more spontaneous manner imitating that of knocking on your neighbor friend’s door and wandering to the playground to see who’s there as a child, instead of excessively texting back and forth and failing to go due to getting distracted by your phone.

Simultaneously, I have been very anxious about the effects of rapidly developing generative AI that threatens our consensus on reality and ultimately even our sense of meaning and purpose as humans. How can we have productive societal conversations when the dead internet theory has practically come true and you cannot tell whether you are talking to a person or a bot online? How can we know anything to be true when any text, image, audio or video can be cheaply and convincingly generated by AI in seconds? What is the point of writing books, composing music or making films when AI can do all of that in no time already or at the latest in a few years? How does the judicial system operate when all evidence is so easily falsifiable? How can a democracy make informed choices when we cannot trust the public conversation to be real? How does our society function when its institutions are undermined by all that we already let out of the Pandora’s box?

Continuing down this rabbit hole can be very overwhelming, prompting one to go scream about it into the void even though, ironically, you cannot be certain that anyone is listening there. However, a simple autumn walk outside with fresh, crisp air and a beautiful sunset painting the clouds red quickly recenters me every time to realize that almost all of those are simply problems of the cyberworld and societies have existed and occasionally even somewhat functioned thousands of years before too and so, maybe the here-and-now will always be mostly okay.

This is where my motivation to bring the bulk of social interaction back from social media into the real world stems from. Digitalization should be in service of being able to enjoy real life and real relationships more. Everything you don’t want to do should be as frictionless as possible so that you have more time and energy to enjoy the fruits of the societal-level productivity increases as well as voluntarily challenge yourself to do hard, but meaningful things.

Problem

Based on the above, in my perspective, the problem we are attempting to tackle can then perhaps be distilled as forgotten local agency, referring to how many people largely live in digital spaces such as social media and video games and perceive them as more relevant to their lives than they actually are, while forgetting that most of their quality of life likely comes from their immediate environment, habits and close relationships in the real world, over which they can often also have the largest influence.

I have seen people get mad at each other for failing to tap a heart icon or to send a picture to the other without any substantial content on social media while being the best of friends when in the same room. Everyone knows about the presidential elections but few can name even the topics in municipal elections. Some even comment on posts about the Great Pacific Garbage Patch while dropping trash on the ground on their way home. Many fail to realize that their focus should expand from their current environment outwards instead of the opposite, which is so easy to accidentally fall into in the world of global clickbait news articles and carefully psycho-engineered social media algorithms serving our worst tendencies while profiting off of our attention.

This results in doomscrolling and sky high phone usage times taking away time, energy and attention from local life with its highs going unexperienced and lows unattended. This, on the other hand, leads to less active and more sedentary and isolated lifestyles leading to poorer overall physical, social and mental health, often leading to vicious cycles where less energy and contact with other people makes it all the more harder in the future leading to feelings of isolation, loneliness and loss of community. In response to this, tribes are found online, leading to polarization and the only exposure to the opposite side is often the most misrepresented. This goes on and on but The Social Dilemma is a great documentary on the topic for all those interested to go deeper.

Even if you have none of the abovementioned problems and barely spend any time on social media, how do you convince enough of your friends to do the same and go, for example, play a game of football with ten or twenty people? If you don’t have such a group ready, getting everyone to the field just once, let alone twice or thrice, can be an organizational nightmare in terms of agreeing on the time and place or even staying on topic long enough to do so in an active group chat. Once all that is done, the info is often long lost somewhere way above in the list of messages, only some people show up because some forgot and some didn’t realize it was actually happening and made other plans and when you are trying to meet up with the others already on the way, everyone has to send their locations individually to the chat, all of which you have to check individually to find out who is nearest and if you should still wait for someone or not.

In the realm of business, the incentives of an attention-based economy are all wrong but this is not the only disturbing trend. Corporate gigantism threatens to consume most small, local businesses and replace them with monopolistic chains, which sure, may sell more standardized goods and services and even at a slightly lower price initially but threatens to reduce many of the contrasting differences between cities to mere architecture in the case in which every restaurant replaced either by a McDonalds or a Subway. This results not only in significantly decreased diversity but also quality, especially in service when all the customer-facing employees have their hands tied beyond strict protocol, even if they wanted to help. Most local businesses have a heart and soul and a willingness to go above and beyond to help, particularly their regulars who often create a very unique atmosphere, which cannot be found anywhere else, whereas chains are often sterile and have no-one really directly responsible for anything, so that the customer is at their mercy instead of the other way around. Perhaps the worst examples of this are airlines with dynamic pricing, overbooking, non-refundable tickets, difficult-to-reach and impersonal customer service and the habit of shifting all costs and responsibility to the customer.

The problem of forgotten local agency thus has multiple dimensions ranging from individual well-being and local environment to global business and societal-level issues. These have to obviously be tackled in a wide variety of ways, but one of them includes empowering people to find, build and become more engaged and spontaneous in their local, real-life communities.

Solution

We want to develop digital tools to help, encourage and empower people to enjoy their real life and relationships more with a sustainable business model aligned to this goal. Hence, Miitti App is a map-based social app that connects people in the real, physical world over local activities and shared interests in an effort to make your city feel like an inviting, open playground again.

Our high-level vision is to bring social life back from social media into the real world. Thus, Miitti’s goal is to become a platform where users can discover the local scene for any activity, the places where it’s happening, and, most importantly, the friends to go with – whether they’re already familiar or complete strangers until now. We focus on activities as a means to bring people together, rather than the “people shopping” typical of dating apps as this makes meetings more natural, as participants’ expectations are shaped entirely by the defined activities. To further this goal more and serve also pre-existing friend groups and returning users, we also want to make organizing meetings, gatherings and events easier and more spontaneous overall.

We address the growing need for increased community spirit, making new friends, alleviating loneliness, reducing siloing, and activating people both socially and physically by encouraging genuine, real-life interactions over limited social media-based communication, where authentic and open in-person encounters foster a sense of unity, belonging, and meaning, as well as mutual understanding. These, in turn, lead to new ideas, groups, communities, businesses, a more vibrant local scene, and increased demand for experiences and local businesses offering activities, events, and facilities, whom we want to connect with interested users in order to foster connections between them and the locals to retain a varied and vibrant offering of truly personal services.

The beauty of our business model is that it perfectly aligns with everyone’s goals. The best of the brick-and-mortar businesses and event organizers attract new customers with their facilities and events, whereas our users can find interesting commercial real-life experiences in addition to non-commercial ones and we act out our mission of bringing social life back from social media to the real, physical world. The faster this happens, the better for all parties involved.

If you would like to try Miitti App, visit our home page for download links for both Android and Apple. If you would like to contact me for feedback, questions or propositions, send a message to miro@miitti.app!

Miro Keimiöniemi,

CTO of Miitti App