You have the people.
They still don’t know each other.
A mailing list, a following or a group chat can hold a hundred thousand people who have never met. Groups takes that same list and forms it into small circles of six who live near each other, are free the same evenings, and meet in person. A leader approves every group before anybody is told.
No directory to browse. No spreadsheet to sort. Nobody left standing on their own.
How many people are already yours?
16,666 groups of 6
meeting in their own neighborhoods, on the evenings they are actually free. Four people the round cannot place are handed somewhere to go the same day.
Groups of 6 is the default. You set the number, and the tolerance around it.
See it
It is three screens, and here they are.
Your own page, where people join. Your console, where the proposed groups arrive with the reasons behind them. And each member’s own page, from the email they get, where they find out who they are meeting and when.
1Your page, at your own link
Find your six.
Answer the questions below. We will place you with five people who live near you and are free the evenings you are. It takes about three minutes.
Nothing is published until a leader approves it.
The slug is yours: northside, redeemer, lagos-alumni. It is the one thing you have to share.
2Your console, with the reasons
Why this group. All six inside 2.4 miles of Rogers Park. Tuesday is the only evening all six marked free. Four are in the same season of life, and the host has run a group before.
Why this group. Five inside 3 miles of Uptown, all free Thursdays. One seat is held open for the next person who joins in this corner of the city.
Close enrollment, form, review, publish. Four decisions, in order, and no member hears anything until the last one.
3Their page
Your group
You are in Group A.
✓ A leader approved this group
Sent by email when the group was published
When you publish, every member gets an email with a link to their own page: who, when, and where. Nothing to install.
The problem
A group chat is not a community.
Every tool in this category hands your people a room and wishes them luck. A directory, a map, a search box, a thread with four hundred people in it. Then it hands back the hardest social task there is: find your own people, from a list, alone.
Why the open room fails, specifically
The people most likely to form a group in an open room are the ones who already knew somebody. The people the program exists for, the new, the shy, the recently moved, the ones on the edge, read the room, decide they are late to something, and quietly stop opening it. An open room is not neutral. It rewards whoever arrived first, and the people who most needed placing are the ones it places last.
The open room
“Here are 400 people. Good luck.”
The work of forming a group is left with the person least equipped to do it, at the moment they are least likely to try.
mbio Groups
“Here is your group, and here is why.”
Six people matched on where they live, how far they will travel, their season of life and the evenings they are actually free. Approved by a human before a single member hears about it.
Where this came from
Groups was built in the year nobody could gather.
In 2020 we could not meet the way we always had, and the need to care for one another did not pause. That is mutual care, and it is where Groups began. It forced a question we had spent years avoiding: how do you keep the DNA, the feel, the culture and the mark of a real gathering when you cannot put everybody in one room?
The answer, and why it became the product
Stop running one large gathering and start forming many small ones on purpose, with the same care inside each. Six people who know each other’s names is not a smaller version of a hall with three hundred in it. It is the size at which people actually change. The pandemic did not invent that idea. It removed every excuse we had for not building it.
Same DNA
The questions, the covenant, the rhythm of a season. Fifteen years of running this by hand, written down as rules a machine can keep.
Mutual care as the floor
Care does not wait for a round to close. Anyone can ask for help and anyone can offer it, whether or not they are currently in a group.
A size where things change
Six people, one evening, one season, and one person who checks in each week. Small enough that being absent is noticed.
Who it’s for
One engine. Six very different rooms.
The rules change per room, and they are configuration rather than a rebuild. Group size, which answers are hard rules and which are preferences, your covenant, your dates, your color.
Churches
A group launch every season, currently run on a spreadsheet and a volunteer's Sunday afternoon. Campus, life stage and a trained leader per group are usually the hard rules.
Social organizations
Alumni chapters, member clubs, civic groups, affinity networks. Hundreds of members who see each other once a year at the big event and never in between.
Online communities
A hundred thousand followers is an audience, not a community. Groups gives that audience somewhere to be on a Tuesday night, in their own neighborhood, without you hosting any of it.
Universities
Cohorts that turn over annually, and a first-year on-ramp that has to be kept separate from returning students. Tenure is a formation input, not a tag.
Employers
Belonging programs that must not simply re-form the org chart. Function and location become diversity weights rather than filters.
Cities
Strangers placed by proximity and season of life, meeting where they actually live rather than where the program is run from.
Built for
Make it yours
Your link. Your questions. Your rules. Your color.
Nothing here is a fork or a custom build. Your organization gets its own address, its own form and its own brand on every screen your people see. Change the color below and watch the page change with it.
Find your six.
Answer the questions below. We will place you with five people who live near you and are free the evenings you are. It takes about three minutes.
Nothing is published until a leader approves it.
Your own address
One link to share, and it is yours. Put it in a bio, a bulletin, a pinned post or an email.
Your own questions
Use the five we know work, edit them, or add your own. Each one is either a hard rule the engine cannot break or a preference it optimizes for.
Your own rules
Group size and the tolerance around it, your covenant or none, who may lead, and the dates the round opens and closes.
Your own brand
Color, typeface, and the shape of a person. Five variables, one set of code. Your people see you, not us.
Getting started
Nothing to migrate. One thing to collect.
Groups is not a system of record and does not want to become one. Whatever you already run keeps the people; a round takes a copy of the pool for one season and hands back groups.
Configure the program
Group size, hard rules and preferences, your covenant or none, and the dates.
Share your link
One address. People join themselves, or a leader loads a roster and sends sign-in links.
Enrollment runs
This is the long pole every time. No amount of engineering shortens it, because the software is waiting on people.
Form, review, publish
The engine takes seconds. Reading the proposed groups takes an hour or two. Publishing is a separate decision.
Case study
Fifteen years by hand, before it was software.
Groups did not start as an idea about software. It started as a model one organization ran manually for fifteen years, across more than forty cities, until doing it by hand stopped scaling.
Six strangers, one group, one season, run on a spreadsheet and a volunteer’s Sunday afternoon.
The Foundation built its whole program on placing people who did not know each other into small groups that met over dinner, matched on proximity, life stage and availability. It worked, and it did not scale: every season, a person re-sorted hundreds of rows by hand and still left people unplaced.
They are the first organization running Groups as software, at groups.ourfamilydinner.org, and the reason the product knows what a backfill is.
One deployment is one deployment. We are not going to dress it as a thousand. Judge Groups by the mechanism, and by asking us to run your season in front of you.
Pricing
Pay for a season, or for the platform.
An output is separable from an operation. Hand us a roster once and take back the groups, or run every season yourself in the console.
Run it once, with us
$499 one-time
One round, up to 250 people. No subscription.
- You send the roster; we configure the program
- We run enrollment and the engine
- You get the groups and the reason for each
- Yours to keep, in a spreadsheet or ours
Run it yourself, every season
$249 a month
Up to 250 people. $2,500 a year if you would rather pay once.
- Unlimited rounds and seasons
- Your own link, form, rules and brand
- Leader console and member app
- Backfill when a seat opens mid-season
- Mutual care for anyone a round cannot place
Multi-site, campus and city
Custom monthly
Priced on sites, programs, and how often the people turn over.
- Many sites and programs, one roll-up
- Cohort, tenure and annual-turnover rules
- Import from the system you already run
- Reporting for leadership, and named support
Not sure which one you are?
Every conversation starts the same way, whichever card you came from: one call, your rules, and a price for your situation.
Individuals join through an organization already running Groups rather than buying it.
Run one season in front of us.
Bring a roster and a date. We will configure the program, run the enrollment, and show you the groups it proposes and the reasons it chose them, before you decide anything.