This app thinks New Yorkers are secretly dying to talk to strangers

It’s generally known that New York is one of those friendly towns where everyone says “Good morning,” and you know your neighbors by name. At least that’s how New Yorkers want it to be, says Michael Murdock, a genial midwesterner (also formerly of North Carolina) and founder of the new app Neibr.
Neibr allows users to create an event — happy hour on Friday afternoon, pickup basketball on Saturday morning, etc. — and people in the area who uses the app can browse the events around them and join in. Enter Tinder metaphor here.
“I’ve lived in the north for almost ten years now. All the New Yorkers I know are dying to talk and meet new people,” Murdock said in an interview with Technical.ly Brooklyn. “We all have this facade where we don’t talk to new people, but I think beneath that people are starving for more interaction.”

The idea for Neibr started when Murdock moved to the city to work as a technology project manager for JPMorgan Chase. Originally from Ohio, he didn’t have a ton of friends in the city and found it difficult to meet people. At the same time, there were young people living floor upon floor in all the buildings around him.
A year ago, he and his partner, Max Davis, were thinking of ideas for a business and he remembered his decade-old problem, realizing there was still no good solution to it. He decided to leave his job, by then with Morgan Stanley, and go whole hog on Neibr in May.
“It’s a roller coaster,” he said about life as a founder. “It’s good, though. The first goal we had for the summer was to see if the public wanted this product. We’ve had a great response with 500 downloads thus far. People have been like, ‘Why doesn’t this already exist?'”
Murdock himself has made friends using Neibr already. A little while ago he made an event at a Williamsburg bar for a good happy hour special. A businessman who’d just moved to Brooklyn for work arrived, and the two hit it off and have hung out since then.
This month Murdock launched a Kickstarter campaign. Murdock views the Kickstarter not merely as a way to raise some money, but potentially more importantly as a way to get his network involved and invested and to market the app to new people. (Experts agree: Kickstarter’s really about marketing.)
Support by Aug. 2

With the app complete, beta users active, and marketing underway, one question remains: Will New Yorkers really want to hang out with randos?