The service that lets you pull together some friends and meet new people for drinks will be dramatically lowering the time involved in setting up an outing with the launch of the company’s iPhone app on Tuesday and on-demand meet-ups rolling out to different cities. No longer will you have to wait two weeks to bring two friends and meet three friends at a bar through the app. Soon you’ll be able to get a Grouper going within the hour.

There have been no shortage of next-generation dating apps launching recently, with a variety of companies trying to help millennials find other people through their smartphones. And most of these, like Grindr or Tinder, are already mobile and location-based. But Grouper CEO Michael Waxman said the company will add the benefits of mobile while maintaining the central premise of the app that’s made it so popular. Namely, that people want to meet other people without the label of a date, with the comfort of friends along for the night, and without the creepy factor of photo-based apps.

“If Tinder’s a game, we’re the anti-game. If Tinder is playing Hot or Not and messaigng back and forth, we’re like, let’s cut the BS and be humans and share a drink and see if there’s anything there,” Waxman said. “It’s still the hardest thing and also the most valuable part of the equation.”

Previously, users would gather up two friends for a Grouper, and it could take up to two weeks to be paired with another group of three for a night out. Unlike photo-based apps, you’re not picking someone based on their profile photo — you and your friends are blindly matched with another friend group via the Grouper algorithms. And then a Grouper staff member would sign off on the match, which affected the time it took to create the pairs. Each Grouper participant pays a fee which covers the first round of drinks at a bar picked for you (and has provided the company with a solid business model, Waxman said).

The company has been working to streamline this process and get people together faster, bringing the time from weeks down to days, and Waxman said that adding a mobile app is the final piece of that puzzle that will bring the total time down to a matter of hours. And for participants, they won’t be tied to the desktop anymore, although they could previously get SMS notifications while they were out.

“It’s really Grouper as it was meant to be. We started on the desktop web because we could iterate more quickly. But for meeting people in the physical world, the phone makes more sense,” said Waxman, who notes that he met his own girlfriend on Grouper. “From the map of where you’re going, to messaging back and forth with the Grouper concierge through the app, there are just a ton of ways it can make Grouper better.”

The new iPhone app will be available to all users beginning Tuesday when it hits Apple’s app store, providing iPhone users with features like maps and messaging right away. But the on-demand Grouper feature that creates dates in under an hour will be rolling out more slowly as the company prepares to meet demand in different cities. Waxman said the app has been growing tremendously, and while he didn’t disclose registered or active users, he said Grouper is now running in 20 different American cities and has plans for more.

“We’re really inpspired by apps like Uber, where you press a button and something great happens. But we think that meeting three cool people is better than a car.”

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Netflix may suffer from limited mobility
• Facebook’s IPO filing: ideas and implications
• CES 2012: a recap and analysis

But as a single 20-something I never assumed dating sites were really geared toward my friends and me. While most of the stigma around online dating seems to have gone away, the sites still felt like services for people in their 30s, 40s, or older. Sure, my generation is supposedly all about hook-up oriented apps and social location-based apps, but those seem to solve a different problem. Frankly, traditional online dating sounded kind of stuffy.

So I was surprised this past weekend when I logged onto Facebook and found several of my friends — all 20-somethings living in urban areas like myself — posting about Grouper, a Y Combinator-backed dating site that pairs two groups of three friends and sends them to a bar on a group date. I was surprised that I found myself thinking, “I might actually do that.”

Wisdom of the crowds

There’s nothing new about the concept of a group date, but what makes Grouper and other sites like HowAboutWe interesting is that they’re using technology in a vastly different way than traditional dating sites to tackle the problem of human chemistry. Instead of using questionnaires and databases to figure out which qualities in people might make a successful match, the sites are taking a more limited approach. Grouper gives people just a few questions to answer, matches them up using location and mobile technology, and then puts them together in real life to see if there’s a good fit. And so far, perhaps surprisingly, these in-person dating sites are appealing mainly to 20-somethings. (Perhaps we’re less emotionally-stunted and smartphone-connected than people have assumed?)

Grouper CEO Michael Waxman said his company views technology as a catalyst for bringing people together and solving some of the logistical barriers to interaction, but not as something that ultimately creates the bonds between people that sites like his aim to provide:

“One of the bigger picture things we think of a lot is how traditional social networks are sort of weirdly isolating. I mean, the typical use case of Facebook is you’re by yourself in your room at the glow of your computer,” he said. “I think that technology could be actually social and not isolating, so we said, ‘what does it look like to use the same technology that isolates us to actually bring us together?’ Let’s put down our phones and computers and use technology to make stuff like this possible, but then enjoy the company of the people we’re with.”

HowAboutWe, a site that allows people to select each other based around an activity and meet up offline, has seen similar success in this field, having just announced one million dates created this week.

“It aligns with how the web actually works and how dating actually works,” said HowAboutWe co-founder Brian Schechter. “Traditional sites are more like interviews, where you lay out information and then you go out on bland coffee shop-like dates. Whereas here, you actually connect around mutual interests and then go out and see if there’s a spark around some other person.”

Grouper pairs up two groups of three friends (three guys and three girls, three guys and three guys, etc.) and sends them to a bar, where the first round of drinks are covered by the $20 per person fee. The company picks the bar, confirms the date, and doesn’t give you info on the other group until you arrive at the bar. The company even texts you during the meet-up to ask how it’s going — a task that Waxman said started to seem overhwhelming as Grouper grew, but an idea they’ve been able to scale by building their own custom CRM to accomplish.

So how do they make the pairs? Waxman said it actually involves a good combination of human intuition and technology — an actual person has to sign off on each Grouper that’s created.

“It’s half human, half machine,” he said, noting that having six people join each group solves another problem common to dating sites, which is that if they do their job too well and start making matches, you lose your customers as soon as you’ve found success. With six people, the chances of three couples pairing off is pretty low, but the chance of one couple creating a good story for the other four people to share is much higher.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Facebook’s IPO filing: ideas and implications
• GigaOM Euro 20: the European startups to watch
• How consumer media will change in 2013