The challenge
Most social networks are built on the people you already know: classmates, colleagues and family. The founders of a US social networking startup wanted to begin at the other end. They asked us for an interest-based social network app, where strangers connect because they care about the same things rather than because they share a contact list.
That shifts the first problem a social product has to solve. A network built on friendships can borrow its graph from an address book. A network built on interests starts empty for every new member. Unless newcomers find like-minded people quickly, their feed stays quiet and they drift away.
The founders also wanted the product to feel familiar. Nobody should have to learn a new way of posting or responding before the app gives them anything back.
What we built
We built a social platform with three connected parts, each taken straight from the founders' brief.
Interest-based discovery. Members find other people through the interests they share, not through people they already know.
Posts. Members share posts with people who have similar interests, so what they write reaches readers likely to care.
Reactions. Members react to posts in a feed that behaves the way mainstream social apps have taught people to expect.
The three parts lean on each other. Discovery gives a new member someone worth hearing from. Posts give those new connections something to talk about. Reactions give whoever posted a reason to come back and post again.
We kept posting and reacting close to patterns people already use every day. That was a deliberate call: when a product's difference is who you get to know, the way you talk to them should stay out of the way.
How it works day to day
Picture a member who has just moved to a new city and wants to find people who share a hobby. Instead of searching for friends by name, they start from the interests they care about, and the platform shows them other members who list the same ones.
From there the routine is familiar. They scroll through posts from like-minded members, react to the ones they enjoy and write a few of their own. Each reaction tells the person who posted that someone with the same passion noticed.
Week by week, that member's feed fills with people they had never met before joining. That is the whole idea: the network grows out of shared interests instead of an existing circle of friends.
The result
The founders now have a working social platform built around their idea. People can find others who share their interests and talk with them through posts and reactions.
We have kept this account short on numbers on purpose. We have not published member counts or engagement figures, and we won't guess at them here. What the platform makes possible is the founding idea itself: members read posts from people they found through a common hobby or passion, rather than from an old address book.
What the research says
A new network competes with habits. Pew's 2025 study of social media use found that 84% of US adults use YouTube and 71% use Facebook (Pew Research Center, 2025). Newcomers arrive with expectations set by those apps, which is why we kept the feed familiar.
US users are split between iPhone and Android. Statcounter, a web analytics company, put iOS at 53.59% and Android at 46.39% of mobile use in the US in September 2026 (Statcounter Global Stats). Building the app in React Native let one codebase reach both groups, alongside the React web version.
Moderation is part of the product. Pew found that 41% of Americans had personally experienced online harassment, and 79% rated social media companies only fair or poor at dealing with it (Pew Research Center, 2021).
Where AI fits next
None of this was part of the first release. A recommendation model could suggest people and posts based on the interests each member has picked. A moderation model could flag abusive posts for a human moderator to review, so a person still makes the final call.
Planning an interest-based social network app?
Before you build a social product around shared interests, it helps to answer four questions:
How will a brand-new member find their first few connections on day one?
Will interests come from a fixed list you control, or from tags members create?
Who reviews reported posts, and how quickly must they respond?
Which posting and reacting habits will you keep familiar, and where will your product feel different?
Our SaaS and MVP development and mobile app pages explain how we take a first version to launch. You can also read our guide on how to build a SaaS product MVP. More of our work for new ventures is on our startups page.
