I've used Meetup in two cities now (Seattle and SF) and I don't consider it a great platform for meeting friends. It's a great platform for people with common interests to go out and do X, but I find its convertibility into actual friendships is really low.
The organizer-driven flow also means that if the group organizer slacks, the whole community goes kaput. It's rare to find a group with a dedicated enough organizer pool to keep things going week after week.
Wait, he has a startup that is basing product features on analytics on user data? How is he getting a statistically significant sample size for something that appears to be pre-launch?
I've never had enough traffic during a private beta to hit a 95% confidence level. That's pretty amazing! I can't even imagine finding tens of thousands of people that would log in every day in order to hit it.
There are tons of digital products to help meet new friends. Did he not even check Meetup? This just seems naive.