Bubblic

We are doing our best to help people who feel lonely in today's day and age because I (Albert, co-founder) have personally been through it during my time in grad school.

I was going through a long-distance relationship at that time, and the workload was tough during my PhD. I did have friends that I hung out with and even went to cafes to study together, but once they got girlfriends and boyfriends, they left me… I was not their priority anymore.

It felt incredibly lonely and I could not get the kind of support from my girlfriend since she was on the other side of the Pacific Ocean. I needed someone that I could talk to and do things with, outside of the romantic boundary. I tried looking, but what I found online were all these dating apps that gamified and capitalized on the desperation of the lonely men and women.

I was not fond of how the tools that claimed to help people find partners and meaningful connections boiled people down to simple profiles consisting of several pictures and bullet points of what they are looking for. In my opinion, they cause increasing number of people to feel lonely by overemphasizing on vanity and shallow qualities of a person instead of who they are.

I believe the web can be a better place for people to find others who they resonate with, and the current offerings just do not cut it. Having personally experienced loneliness and finding no solutions for my problem back then, I vowed to create an app myself that I think can help people find meaningful connections. So, here I am. I quit my job in Sept 2022 to dive into this full-time as I grappled with the meaning of my life and what I wanted to leave behind in this world. Bubblic has been helping people all around the world make meaningful connections since launching in June 2023, and it has been the most personal and meaningful work I have taken on so far.

Once you download the app and create an account, you can anonymously record a voice message to be shared with the world. Your message is linked to your rough location (>50 km accuracy) that you share ONCE when you check-in at least once a week.

Bubblic was initially designed for lonely people to talk and practice talking without distractions from images and videos. We think that a lot of people are too shy to speak in real life because they fear sounding awkward and being judged for their looks, and end up being more closed in on themselves.

Also, we think texts are easy to misinterpret and abuse, compared to speaking with your voice. We have all experienced it first or second hand on many text-based forums and apps. And let's not even talk about photos… We hope that people who feel shy muster up the courage to speak on this platform and develop the skills and confidence to eventually be confident and make connections in real life!

After interacting with many users and observing how they use Bubblic, we have decided to add the ability to share photos and videos for power users to enrich their interactions. We have measures in place to continue to foster authentic connections by only allowing photo/video sharing for people who have exchanged messages before and who are subscribed to our app, i.e., have skin in the game.

Your location is only shared to give context of where you are coming from for other users on this platform. We believe that knowing where each of us are can help us feel more authentic than having just a username. Your location is NOT linked to your email or username, and we do NOT sell or share your location information with external entities. For more information, please refer to our Privacy Policy.

On Bubblic, everyone can listen to everyone's voice messages, just like many other public forums such as Twitter and Reddit. We believe that engaging with strangers in public is better than engaging in private because:

1. it encourages us to be civil;

2. it allows for people jumping into a conversation to make the platform more lively; and

3. it helps those of us who are shy or are clueless about how to engage in a conversation learn from examples.

No, we do not share your data with anyone or sell it to anyone. Your rough one-time location (>50 km) and voice messages are visible to all users on this platform by nature of Bubblic, but they are not linked to your email or username. For more information, please refer to our Privacy Policy.

We are focused on making Bubblic the best platform for people to engage in authentic conversations from all around the world.

We offer premium features to make our platform more engaging for power users. The features include private messaging, photo/video sharing, and anonymous voice, with more features coming soon. We do not generate any revenue from selling your data or advertising.

If you would like to send us tips to help us keep our server running, we would greatly appreciate your gesture! Buy Me Coffee

Bubblic is different from other anonymous voice chat platform in two ways:

1. You share your approximate location (>50km). You know where all these people are and it gives real-life, physical context, instead of them being just random usernames. We think that sense of physical presence is missing in a lot of today's digital communications that contributes to loneliness.

2. You leave voice messages, not make a live phone call. We think voice messages are less intimidating because you can leave them at your leisure, and there is something about crafting your voice message that is a little therapeutic as well.

From talking to our users on Bubblic, we found that many struggle with going outside to meet people in real life because of their anxiety, geographical location, disabilities, and time, to list a few.

Many people suffer in the dark. We want Bubblic to be some sturdy straws for them to grab onto for re-shoring themselves. Ultimately, we hope that people can take the social skills they have developed on this platform to engage in real-life interactions with new people they meet or even with people they first met on Bubblic!