I made an app for lonely people and they left 1000s of voice messages

I’ve been using Bubblic since it came out. I’ve had many interesting and fulfilling conversations with people who are lonely and people who are supportive of others. It’s comforting to hear other peoples stories. I’d highly recommend it for anyone who is lonely and would like someone to talk to. If you are the type of person who enjoys listening to others and being supportive you’d find using the app very enjoyable.

I have personally experienced a period of extreme loneliness during my grad school in 2017, and had wished that there was a better way to platonically connect with like-minded people than what was offered at the time which primarily focused on dating (Tinder, Bumble, etc.).

I quit my job last year to finally work on this idea full-time because I thought this was the most meaningful work that I could do before other life responsibilities caught up on me. I am working with my wife and a friend from South Africa whom I met by talking to him on my platform!

We currently generate no revenue, as we believe we need to first build up the network effect to generate value for the users in order to earn the right to offer additional premium features for power users. We take privacy seriously, and do not plan to sell or share user data with anyone or use them to train an AI model.

The link I shared is for the web-version of Bubblic, where you can listen to all the messages left by our users. Please download the mobile app at https://bubblic.co to leave your voice messages!

To share briefly our journey, we started by launching this simple website: https://lonelyworld.info as a mini MVP. Then we got a tremendous response from various forums including Hacker News and Reddit, that we decided to pursue this idea further and develop into an app. Our team is me, my wife, and a friend from South Africa that I met on the LonelyWorld website! I realize that had I never launched that mini MVP, I wouldn't have met my friend to work on my mission together! The mantra is right: one should always build in public :)