Reminds me of Jelly which shut down earlier this year, but with a location/city focus. Why don't you think Jelly worked and how will Hubble avoid this same fate, @philipkuklis?
@rrhoover That's a good question! I think Jelly had an outstanding product experience but when it comes to social products, the network is the biggest value (just look at Reddit 👈).
With Hubble, we want to be hyper local & hyper focused. Communities take time. We’re not interested in getting as many people as fast as possible in the app, but to really focus and drive the engagement in a few selected areas.
That’s why our goal on Product Hunt is to connect with people, who would love to start / or bring their own community on Hubble (already have “International Friends SF“ & “Makers SF“ in San Francisco).
Super excited about the journey ahead!
Hey Product Hunters, very excited to be here today. And thank you @gabriel__lewis for posting!
Hubble is a product that Kamil (my older brother) and I originally started back when we were still college students in Europe. The idea came when we were both studying in new cities or abroad and felt the disconnect from our surroundings.
Nowadays everyone’s connected to their friends & family (Facebook), people they’re interested in (Twitter) and their colleagues (LinkedIn), but what about the people in our own city? How do we find out what’s happening nearby or get in touch with others?
That’s why we made a simple Q&A newsletter back in 2016, shared it with a few friends in Lisbon, and quickly realized that we’re not the only ones with this pain.
After months of learning how to code an iOS app, grinding it out in our parents’ basement in Germany, getting accepted into the StartFast accelerator batch ’17 in Upstate New York and working with a few hundred users in several communities from around the world, we’ve seen a lot of use cases for our hyperlocal Q&A app:
- Asking about new places
- Finding like-minded people for a beer (e.g. foreign exchange students)
- Looking for a date after you got ditched by your GF on Valentine’s Day… and finding one 🤔
If you have any questions, please feel free to ask! Also we would love to get your feedback and invite you to give it a try 🙌
@gabriel__lewis@philipkuklis Does it have a profanity filter or some way to filter for abuse? Working on a startup right now that uses machine learning to detect abuse/harassment and would love to chat about implementing our API into your product!
Would love to chat if this is something you're interested in. Shoot me an email at justin at kiteai dot com.
@pottsjustin That's an interesting idea! Right now, the community leaders are filtering abusive content together with us manually. Will def reach out to hear more about your solution ☝️
I know that you're still in the early days, but is an Android app on the roadmap? Great work, and GREAT marketing. Very impressed. Not really useful for where I live (rural area, not great mobile connectivity) but definitely an interesting app. Looking forward to seeing what else you guys cook up!
And come on, personalized thank you messages for PH upvotes? That's how you win at PH. XD
@xtoq Haha all credit goes to @DannyLowney for the idea. We're currently developing the Android beta (ugh such a pain in comparison to iOS 😃). Thank you for your comment!
I've been using Hubble for a while now, and I gotta say that Philip and Kamil are creating a helpful and engaged community with Hubble here in Lisbon.
The app is a no-brainer to use, and you actually get answers rather quickly.
What I'm more excited for after talking with Kamil is that the team seems to have a clear vision of what this can become, and plenty of things to try and test.
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Hey really cool stuff. Couple things: In the explore area, you should make a point to say there are no outstanding questions rather than having a perpetual loading symbol while you keep querying your database. I thought my app was broken until i asked my own question and then that appeared in the explore section, which made me realize that "OOHH" there were just no questions before.
@mitch_troy Good catch Mitchell, we'll fix it right away. Thank you!
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@philipkuklis Huge fan of the idea though! Also 2 more things haha. Sorry I like the idea a lot so I want to help. At first I thought the button on the upper right tells me how many people are on Hubble in the area, which if it isn't you should add because for users thinking of asking a question, including a number of users could help add legitimacy to the app and make a user more confident in their question getting answered. But also I have no clue what that button does, on my app it does nothing. So im not sure what that number is, or what that button does.
@mitch_troy Haha no problem, we're here to learn! On the upper right corner you can see how many people were active in the last 15 minutes in a 1 mile radius. A few people have told us now that it looks like a button, we'll definitely work on that. Thanks so much for the feedback Mitchell!
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Awesome, def. going to give this a spin. Reminds me of an app I loved years ago, Localmind.
@tsunaze Thanks for the question! Old questions generally disappear from the map & the feed after 24 hours. The conversation inside of the question can still continue but we feel that the map should be focused on what's happening right now.
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