Hello PH community, this is Fabian posting on behalf of Viaano. I’m a fellow co-founder of Huddle and today is the official launch of Huddle 2.0 for iOS and our first-ever Android version release. Unfortunately, our founder, Viaano, was involved in a serious car accident at the end of November that left him unconscious. He is currently recuperating in the hospital after double surgery last month, with his mother and sister by his side. Huddle, initially named Huddlehumans when the idea was first conceived in 2017, and rebranded as Huddleverse in June 2023 during its inaugural app launch on iOS, officially transitioned to the name Huddle after securing the domain huddle.so just before its Android beta launch last month. To give everyone a brief background on Huddle: in 2017, while still a teenager, Viaano started Huddle after discovering his passion for mental health as an intern at the only mental health hospital in his country. He had also experienced severe bouts of his own mental health challenges, including severe anxiety and a neurodevelopmental disorder called essential tremor. He founded Huddle because he felt invalidated and pushed away by a doctor when he finally mustered the courage to seek help for his afflictions for the first time. He didn’t want anyone else to endure the same experience—the painful feeling of being invalidated or lonely due to their struggles, thoughts, and challenges. You can read the rest of his origin story in his own words here: https://huddle.so/a-message-from... This drive to help others led him to code, design, and launch Huddle's first web forum between 2017 and 2019, all while serving in military conscription in the EOD unit, honorably putting his life on the line every day to defuse bombs for his country. From 2020 to 2022, Viaano pivoted Huddle from an online web forum to a more dynamic community, prototyping on existing platforms like Discord and Telegram (for different functions and features). This pivot worked out successfully, growing the community to 50k users and establishing Huddle as one of the largest mental health communities on both platforms—especially as the COVID-19 pandemic negatively impacted the world in unprecedented ways. With an established community and his prototypes validated, Viaano made the decision to drop out of university and focus full-time on developing Huddle into an app in 2023, after he completed the first wireframes at the end of 2022. Going from strength to strength, and with massive support from the community he created, Huddle has evolved from a mental health platform into a social networking and instant messaging app designed for building communities. Viaano’s long-term vision for Huddle has always been for it to become the go-to community aggregator on the internet, similar to how Reddit and Twitter serve as news aggregators. As a second-gen social platform, Huddle’s focus from the very beginning has been on non-toxicity and creating a positive, supportive online space. It aims to have a positive impact on users’ thoughts and behaviors, something that was largely an afterthought for first-gen platforms like Instagram, TikTok, Reddit, Facebook, and Snapchat, which were primarily focused on connecting users. Within one year of its iOS app launch, Huddle reached 100k app downloads. As of today, we’re seeing more than 3 million user activities per month. With the official launch of Huddle’s Android app today, the rapidly accelerating growth of our user base, and the hopeful return of Viaano from his injuries, we are resolutely determined to take Huddle to a whole new level. We sincerely hope for the support of the Product Hunt community in keeping Viaano in your prayers as we continue to bring our vision for Huddle to life. Feel free to send a get well message to Viaano at v@huddle.so or reach out to me at hello@huddle.so if you have any suggestions or feedback on how we can improve. Our goal is to build a product that truly serve the needs of our users and solves their problems, as we continually strive to be better each day for our community. Thank you for your support, PH. - Fabian

Viaano Spruyt

Huddle

Maker

7mo ago

Michael Logan

Using the app now. There are posts every other second and it seems super active. An amazing feat you and your team have achieved as the initial hurdle is always the hardest where most will fail. You must have really struck a chord with so many users such that that they are using your app so frequently and spreading it around. Really nice to see such a unique community supporting a great product. Kudos to your efforts.

Nika

Ambassador

Wish you good luck with the launch! :)

You are welcome! :) @viaano

Huddle 2.0

Non-Toxic Twitter

Non-Toxic Twitter

Huddle 2.0

Non-Toxic Twitter

Non-Toxic Twitter

Do you use Huddle 2.0?

Do you use Huddle 2.0?