Amigo helps you stop texting and start hanging with your friends

Social planning is a tough nut to crack, but a new app called Amigo is looking to make a difference when it comes to how we hang out with our friends.

The premise behind Amigo is that we spend too much time in back-and-forth communication with our friends about what we want to do, where we want to go, and when.

But Amigo aims to be a social secretary of sorts, helping out with all that communication so that all the user has to do is press a button.

Here’s how it works:

When you first download the app, Amigo helps you set up 10 to 15 contacts that you hang out with regularly. From there, you can designate the type of activity you want to do (dinner, lunch, take a walk, grab a coffee), choose which friends you want to hang out with, and pick a time.

Amigo instantly turns that activity into an event invite via webpage, and blasts out an invitation text to the folks you want to hang with.

The app will also remind you when you haven’t seen certain friends in a while.

Social planning proves difficult for most startups for a number of reasons. Even Swarm pivoted from a social planning utility to a social game you play IRL.

For one, it’s difficult to turn nuanced conversations around location, timing, etc. into something more efficient than yet another layer of group chat, which Amigo addresses. But another difficulty in social planning is that people are busy, and flaky, and it’s difficult for any type of software to overcome that.

Amigo has been in an open beta but is now ready to launch publicly. The team is working on smart suggestions for cool places to go as a way of opening up a future revenue model with local businesses and retailers.

For now, however, the team is operating lean, focused on attracting new users and taking in feedback on how to improve product.

You can check out the app here.