Connection Across Time and Space (Why Apps Keep Failing Us)

I was the girl who spent every birthday candle, every 11:11, every shooting star wishing for her person.

Like so many hopeless romantics, I tried everything—dating apps, speed dating, friends setting me up, even letting the NY Post feature me for their Meet Market. And yet, no matter what I tried, I was still the perpetual odd-wheel out.

It wasn’t for lack of effort. By my mid-30s, I had cycled through every app. I moved cities. I handed my phone to friends, begging them to swipe for me. But nothing clicked. My person was out there somewhere. I knew it, they had to be. But the tools meant to help us find each other kept failing, by design, probably.

That magical connection between humans is already rare. It takes timing, openness, chemistry. And modern apps make it feel even more impossible as we're shrunk into bite-sized profiles, hidden behind algorithms, and our loneliness converted into profit. The dating apps thrive on missed things: connections, sparks, messages. “Designed to be deleted”? Please. That’s an FTC lawsuit waiting to happen.

When my dad died, I stopped caring about chasing the next rung on the corporate ladder. What did I have to lose? The one person I was most scared of disappointing was gone. I was too sad to keep faking it at a job I hated, so I quit. And somewhere in that grief, I decided to fix the actual physics of connection—to build something that genuinely let people find each other across time and space.

At first, it was just a lighthouse for me: a profile saying who I was, who I was looking for, and an open invite to meet in World of Warcraft. But then it clicked: this beacon didn’t have to only be mine. It could be for anyone who’s tired of feeling invisible, tired of swiping, tired of being told they’d find love if they just swiped more, had better pictures—or paid more money.

And the more I thought about it, the angrier I got—because the world is full of people like me, all online at the same time, all searching, and yet somehow never able to find each other. Despite billions of internet connections, the systems we’ve been given keep us apart, making it stupidly hard to connect with other humans online.

That’s exactly why I’m building Goblins. No sneaky algorithms. No business model that relies on your continued loneliness. Just a beacon bright enough for people to finally find their people.