Reflections on building a social app

Freddie started with Pride.

When I started working on Freddie, my main goal was to find a way to find all Pride events happening in the Bay. It was surprisingly hard to find events if you didn't have Instagram and harder to find specific things like sober events or smaller gatherings. The first version of Freddie was just an events aggregator and I remember how terrible and brittle it was to use. I had built it using a tool called FlutterFlow.

Over time, I slowly added more features as they made sense and it really started to feel like the book "If You Give a Mouse a Cookie." I added a feed so once there was a feed, we needed profiles. Then once there were profiles, users wanted ways to organize around interests, so we added spaces (interest-based spaces people can run and manage). People also wanted a way to find each other so we added search. And the list goes on.

Eventually Freddie became a full blown social app, but it became that slowly over a few years. To begin with, I didn't want to build a big social media platform and I for sure didn't want to follow the standard playbook.

I didn't want to sell data

I didn't want an app that's built around influencers and ads and trying to sell people things. And most importantly I wanted it to be completely free. I've worked in tech for the last 10 years, so I understand how products usually scale. You raise money, you optimize for growth, and the product starts serving the business model.

I wanted Freddie to stay VC free and I didn't want to optimize for growth.

A lot of investors don't understand this demographic, and there's not much representation from BIPOC LGBTQ people in those rooms. I didn't want the future of Freddie to depend on outside pressure that would eventually push the product away from the community it's meant to serve.

Long-term, I do think Freddie can be community-funded. But right now, the priority is keeping it safe and sustainable. So I plan to continue to self fund and find alternative paths to keep us going.

Freddie didn't start off as a membership based platform

When we first launched Freddie, anyone could join. Over time, we saw the downside of being open.

The decision to become a membership based platform didn't come easy and we labored over it but I remember one day seeing that a new person who had joined was very actively harassing other users. I decided we needed to do something different immediately.

We created an application where we were upfront about our rules and how we were looking for villagers to come join us and build the space we always wanted. Something that has been the most controversial was requiring people to share their digital footprint (this could be a portfolio, a social link, a personal site, a LinkedIn, etc).

Some people appreciate that the membership application has made the community feel safer and more intentional. Some people don't like that they can't be completely anonymous.

But a big part of what's broken about social media is the way anonymity works in practice. It makes it easier for people to cause harm and feel no responsibility. We wanted more accountability to the fact that what people say online can really hurt others.

The membership model wasn't about gatekeeping. It was about making Freddie feel safer and more focused, and it's been the best decision we've made even at the expense of people being upset about it. This isn't the final form of our membership application and we understand that some people truly don't have any digital footprint to share. We're looking at alternative ways to get those users into Freddie.

Moderation is the hardest part

I think I was very naive about what it took to moderate a platform in a way that felt fair and where we really tried to dig into the why. It's not just removing content, it's also about stepping in when conversations are escalating, enforcing boundaries, and making decisions that affect real people.

A lot of people come to Freddie from other platforms already frustrated, especially from other niche queer apps. A very small percentage of those frustrated users bring that energy with them and sometimes they come in wanting to argue, push limits, or test what they can get away with. Sometimes they don't trust anything you say because they assume every platform is lying or trying to exploit them.

I understand where that mistrust comes from. Most social platforms have trained people to expect the worst.

But it does mean that a lot of the work is holding the line consistently. We've had to be very clear that access to Freddie is a privilege, not a right. If someone violates our community guidelines or is disrespectful to others, we take action.

On bigger platforms, there aren't real consequences most of the time. On Freddie, we can't operate that way because we're small and one person can change the experience for everyone.

I'm not interested in over-moderating. I'm interested in accountability. Behind every phone is a human, and people should be responsible for how they treat each other.

People are skeptical about us and I get it

If I hadn't made Freddie myself, I too would be skeptical. Even when we say we don't sell data, we don't monetize, and we don't have outside funding, people don't always believe it. There's a lot of skepticism. Some of it is justified because of what people have experienced elsewhere.

So part of building Freddie has been repeating the same values and decisions over and over, and then backing it up through policy and enforcement.

It's not enough to say we are different, it's about showing up and being consistent.

Hiring matters, and it compounds in both directions

I've funded Freddie myself, I've designed a large portion myself, and I've partnered with different people over the years to build and shape it.

Because it's bootstrapped, hiring has been complicated. It's hard to offer competitive salaries and it's hard to know who will be the right fit. I've learned some lessons the hard way, like getting overcharged for half done work or working with people who weren't aligned. When you're small, mistakes like that are expensive and really painful.

But I've also seen the opposite. When you hire right, the impact compounds. My marketing/design partner has been monumental in giving Freddie a unique voice. Her background is lesbian archive history and art, and she's brought a level of cultural context and perspective that has shaped the product and the brand in a real way.

She's also a big reason why we have personals, as an homage to lesbian personals history from the popular lesbian women-run magazine On Our Backs. That kind of reference point matters because Freddie isn't just an app, we are trying to carry a torch that was lit up by people before us.

This has been one of the clearest lessons for me: hiring for a checklist and based on background on paper can backfire. Hiring someone with a real point of view and depth can change the entire outcome of your company in a positive way.

What we're focused on next

We've been a bit dormant lately just maintaining the app while my life and full time job have kept me busy. My plan for the next six months is to work through the backlog of user requests, and build internal tools so we can track requests better and get community input.

We also want to focus more on offline experiences. We've been wanting to ship a zine for a long time, and we want to start hosting events again.

The goal isn't to compete with big platforms. The goal is to build something that feels safe and welcoming, where people can express themselves without it being at the expense of anyone else.

Freddie started as an events aggregator and it's become something much bigger than what I could have imagined.

We're building it slowly, on purpose. And I'm excited to be here.

Download Freddie and apply to become a member.