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“Do you miss the old internet?”

That’s the question you’re hit with if you find yourself on the website for Perfectly Imperfect.

Founded in 2020 by Tyler Bainbridge, a former engineer at Meta, and Alex Cushing, Perfectly Imperfect is a culture newsletter that has interviewed downtown New York idols and celebrities from Charli XCX to Lorde. It launched a social networking app in 2024.

Bainbridge told Business Insider that his project is trying to capture what the old internet “felt like.”

“When it felt like the goal was to bring people together and the content that people were sharing was purely driven by a need to connect,” he said.

The Perfectly Imperfect app, called PI.FYI, does feel like it exists in an older version of the internet. I’ve been using the app myself for over a year, and it’s been one of the closest comparable experiences to the yee-old days of Tumblr or pre-Elon Twitter I’ve found in my endless pursuit of new corners of the internet.

The app is built around a feed filled with users’ “recs” for music and movies, with life advice and other content sprinkled in.

Usernames are sometimes pseudonyms and call back to the Tumblr blog names that teens would vie for. Like Tumblr or MySpace, users’ profile pages are customizable.

Tumblr’s influence goes deeper than usernames and vibes. One of PI’s advisors is former Tumblr employee Jacob Bijani, the blogging site’s fifth employee.

Bainbridge describes PI as a “social magazine.”

He’s part of a cohort of founders and users seeking experiences outside platforms like Meta’s Instagram and Facebook, X, or TikTok. New social networks have been cropping up in the last few years, and investors are on the hunt for the next big thing in social to emerge. While there’s been some contenders since the rise of TikTok — such as Clubhouse or BeReal — many apps have had fleeting virality.

The business of a ‘social magazine’

Bainbridge said that the newsletter has about 140,000 subscribers, of whom 74,000 have joined the app. Formerly a Substack newsletter, PI left the platform in 2024 and now runs its newsletter internally.

Paid subscriptions are $6 a month and unlock features like the ability to further customize your profile, access the newsletter archive, and receive extra newsletter content. Bainbridge said PI has about 2,000 paying users as of late July.

Revenue is split mostly between these subscriptions and partnerships with brands, Bainbridge said. PI recently worked with Hinge on a guide about being awkward as part of the Match Group-owned dating app’s One More Hour initiative, which set aside $1 million to back projects fueling in-person connection.

While the PI newsletter has ads, Bainbridge said he plans to keep the social app free of ads because they could “diminish the user experience.”

Bainbridge said the company has raised capital to hire more staff, expand into video, and grow the app. He declined to disclose the size of the raise. The PI team consists of three full-time staffers and five part-time contractors, Bainbridge said.

Turning recommendations into real-life experiences

Earlier this year, PI rolled out a feature that lets users share whether they’re single and who they’re interested in.

“I heard about a lot of people who started dating on the platform, and to me it makes perfect sense,” he said. “There’s a nice big photo of someone, and then right below that is exactly what they’re interested in as a person.”

People were also organizing meetups on the app, Bainbridge said, which fueled the app’s conviction around its latest product overhaul: events.

The app now lets users share events happening in their area to the public feed, such as concerts or an arts and crafts night. Some are organized by PI, too, like a bowling event in Brooklyn sponsored by Hinge.

PI’s next era has shades of Facebook’s events and Reddit’s niche communities. Later this year, PI plans to expand its app further with tools to make private communities or groups.

“We want to hit a million users sometime next year,” Bainbridge said. “I think a lot of that’s going to come from some of these product-oriented growth features.”