Your Users Are Lonely AF and Your Engagement Strategy Isn't Helping

Not to be dramatic, but your customers are doom-scrolling at 2 AM because they're lonely, not because your SaaS product is that compelling.

I sat down with Clara Nafria—Barcelona-based tech entrepreneur who's basically building the antidote to everything your growth team thinks is working—and she dropped some uncomfortable truths about why half your target market feels like shaet despite having 8,470 LinkedIn connections.

Here's What Nobody Wants to Admit

We've spent the last decade optimizing for "engagement" (read: addiction), building platforms that keep people glued to screens, and patting ourselves on the back for MAU growth. Meanwhile, over 50% of the population reports feeling lonely.

Cool. Cool cool cool.

Clara's building WoopDo—think of it as an exercise app but for actual human connection instead of, you know, just abs. And before you roll your eyes and mutter "another social platform," hear me out.

The Thing Nobody's Talking About in Your Board Meetings

Every social platform you're probably wasting marketing budget on right now is designed to keep users IN the app. More scrolling = more ads = more revenue. Basic shaet.

But here's the problem: they're not designed to get people connecting in real life. Because—wild thought—if people actually met up and talked to each other, they wouldn't be generating ad impressions.

As Clara put it: "The phone is not going to delete from the equation itself. So how do we introduce the phone to the equation to make those three, four hours just a tiny bit more meaningful?"

Translation: Your users are spending 3-4 hours a day on their phones anyway. Maybe make it suck less?

What Actually Works (Spoiler: It's Weirdly Simple)

Clara's been running beta tests on activities that sound almost too basic to work:

• Getting high schoolers to read the same book at the same time (and actually finish it)

• Prompting people to stop and talk to street musicians instead of walking past with AirPods in

• Turning Friday night Netflix-and-chill into something that doesn't require therapy later

The icebreaker activity for college freshmen? Killed it. The three-minute shower challenge with a sustainability creator? (Yes, really. Yes, it worked. No, I'm not explaining further—just watch the episode.)

Why Your "Team Building" Still Feels Like A Hostage Situation

Workplace loneliness is real. You've got developers who haven't had a real conversation with a coworker in weeks because Slack threads don't count as human connection, my friend.

Your quarterly off-site with the trust fall exercises and the catered lunch nobody wants? Still awkward. Still artificial. Still something everyone complains about in the parking lot after.

What if—and I'm just spitballing here—you could integrate actual, customizable, non-cringe activities into your team's rhythm? Activities that don't feel like corporate-mandated fun but actually foster genuine connection?

That's the play. Woop's giving people a drag-and-drop builder to create experiences tailored to their specific teams, communities, or friend groups. Because one-size-fits-all is a myth we stopped believing in for literally everything except human connection.

The Data You're Not Tracking (But Should Be)

Clara's team is measuring "social relationship health" post-activity. They're showing users the actual impact: "Hey, you walked three miles and had a meaningful conversation. Here's how this improved your mental health."

Meanwhile, most of us are still optimizing for clicks and conversions like it's 2015.

Look, I get it. You need revenue growth. Your investors want hockey stick charts. But maybe—maybe—the path to sustainable growth isn't optimizing for more screen time. Maybe it's actually giving people something that makes them feel less like garbage.

The Uncomfortable Truth for B2B Leaders

If your customer success strategy is all tactics and no actual human connection, you're building a house of cards. If your team culture is Zoom fatigue and async everything, you're hemorrhaging talent and calling it "remote work."

The companies winning in this market aren't the ones with the slickest automation or the most AI features. They're the ones remembering that humans buy from humans, work with humans, and—radical concept—want to feel connected to other humans.

Gen Z is entering the workforce already digitally exhausted. They've grown up on platforms designed to make them feel inadequate. They're craving real connection so hard that a simple "read this book together" activity becomes transformative.

What does that tell you about where we've gone wrong?

Bottom Line

Clara's solving a problem most of us don't want to admit exists: we've built a digital world that's making people miserable, and then we wonder why retention sucks and culture feels hollow.

The next wave of successful companies won't just be the ones with better features or lower CAC. They'll be the ones that actually give a damn about the humans using their products.

So yeah, go watch the full episode. Clara breaks down how they're training AI to design better human experiences, how they're partnering with everyone from Airbnb experience designers to sustainability creators, and why the future of "social" looks nothing like what we've been building.

Or don't. Keep chasing vanity metrics. See how that works out.

P.S. If you're reading this at 11 PM on a Friday because you're "catching up on content" instead of having an actual conversation with another human being, you're exactly who needs to hear this. Put the phone down. Go talk to someone. Your engagement rate can wait until Monday.

And if you're a health tech or medtech exec wondering why your customer relationships feel transactional as hell—this conversation is your wake-up call. The "human connection" thing isn't touchy-feely BS. It's the differentiator you're missing while everyone else is busy optimizing the wrong metrics.

[Watch the full episode here and thank me later.]

Karl Pontau hosts The Human Connection Podcast, where we talk about the stuff that actually matters in business: the humans running it. Because whether you're B2B or B2C, it's really H2H, human to human. Subscribe so you don't miss the next episode where we probably say something that'll make your HR department uncomfortable.