Sam Richardson spent a decade as an elite gymnast, training and working towards a lofty goal: the Olympics. Her life was defined by movement, both in competition and in the moving she had to do up and down the east coast of Australia as part of her training.
Each move meant she had to build her social connections by scratch – by her mid twenties, she’d moved six times.
“It became this really consistent compounding frustration where I was already relocating, but on top of that, I was also growing and changing and evolving,” Richardson tells Women’s Agenda.
“I would find that the friends I did have, we started to go in separate directions, which is fine – it happens, but I found it really challenging to meet people that reflected the person I was becoming.”
“The weekend would roll around and on the one occasion I wasn’t training, I’d want to actually do something in my personal life, go out for dinner, go for brunch, go for coffee, but I would always miss out because I didn’t have the right people to do it with.”
That sense of disconnection and lack of meaningful connection is one millions of Australians now share. According to the latest Medibank Loneliness Population Index, more than half of Australians feel lonely in a typical week.
The Medibank research indicates that those who are classified as “young and free” and are yet to settle down with partners and children of their own, are the most at risk of loneliness.
For Richardson, it was also one of the sparks that would eventually inspire Butter, the startup she co-founded to help people form offline friendship and community in a digital-first world.
“Say I want to go out to dinner this weekend; I’ve had Carlton Wine Room on my list for forever, but I haven’t been able to try it. I can post that onto Butter,” Richardson explains.
“I decide that I want to go this Saturday with five people. That’ll get shown to the people who want to join me, they can request to join, then I can curate and select the guest list before we meet in real life.”
It’s a simple yet profound strategy that goes beyond the reach of traditional social apps by focusing on a community-building approach. Richardson has leveraged her experience as a digital strategist for companies like L’Oréal and David Jones to build a piece of tech that’s making a real social impact.
“Butter has evolved into tech infrastructure and an operating system that can help build community,” Richardson says.
“If it’s peer to peer, if I just want to go grab dinner with someone, I can do that. If I want to join a social club, I can do that. And then the social clubs can leverage the platform to manage their community, manage their ops, [and] sell tickets to their events.”
From her days as a gymnast to becoming a tech founder, Richardson says the idea for Butter also hinged on her pursuit of self-actualisation.
“If you think about Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, connection is on the way to purpose and self-actualisation,” Richardson says.
“And for me, that’s how I really like to think about it, because I want to create the life I want to become the person I want to be. And connection is the way that I can get there and do that.”
Richardson is passionate about positioning Butter as a solution that can help people create the life they want.
“It’s so easy for us to ghost and cancel at the last minute and have the perception of someone on the other side of the screen not being real,” Richardson says.
Building Butter: an “operating system for connection”
It was during Melbourne’s long lockdowns that Richardson decided to act on building Butter.
“We had, you know, 400 days in lockdown in Melbourne. So I decided then that I wanted to build something for myself, and so I used that time teaching myself to code to build Butter.
The response since its launch has been overwhelming.
“I think one of the comments that has been my favourite so far is one we got in my personal inbox. They hunted me down and essentially said, for the first time in two years, that connection as an adult outside of uni has actually felt possible,” Richardson says.
“And it’s made the concept of relocating less overwhelming, and that’s because of Butter.”
As Richardson tells Women’s Agenda, loneliness is complex. It also doesn’t discriminate.
“We’re giving people the tools and the access to actually take the first step. And that, in and of itself, is what is so exciting, because it’s not that we have an inability to make friends, it’s just having that access to be able to do so and do it in the way that we want.”
To learn more about Medibank’s commitment to reducing loneliness head to We Are Lonely | Medibank.
Research commissioned by FiftyFive5 on behalf of Medibank. Research was conducted in July 2024, among a sample of (n=4,131) Australians.