Hive Social
Insider
Launched: October 2019
Number of users: 556,000 daily active users, CEO Raluca “Kassandra” Pop told Insider.
Number of staff: Five — and expanding, Pop said.
Funding: $290,104 raised through WeFunder, a crowdsourcing investment app.
What people are saying: Hive Social seeks to put the fun back in posting online, Pop told Insider.
The 24-year-old self-taught programmer — who maintains handwritten notes for the business in a notebook kept near her bedside — has created a space where users can redecorate their profiles with custom colors, and share video, or text-based posts with their followers, attempting to roll the best parts of multiple social platforms into one.
Notably, Pop said, the platform takes a stricter stance on content moderation than Twitter does, to maintain a platform free from harassment and hate speech — which has surged on Twitter since Musk’s takeover.
“A lot of the feedback that we get is that Hive is really welcoming and relaxing and it’s really inclusive, so we’re just continuing to maintain that,” Pop told Insider. “We’ve taken a really harsh stance against hateful speech, transphobia, homophobia, white supremacy, I mean, all of those things we don’t tolerate that on the app are very explicit with what we allow and what we don’t allow.”
In the wake of Musk’s takeover of Twitter, Hive Social gained a large wave of users, mostly Gen Z and younger millennials. While the platform had the advantage of being established for several years and was able to keep afloat, Hive briefly struggled with the influx of new activity as it skyrocketed server costs and staffing needs.
The growing pains, Pop told Insider, have been worth it — and her sights are aimed even higher: “We definitely want to grow and become one of those next big four apps,” she said.
The Verge described Hive as “a cleaner, better version of Twitter, with an attractive app featuring a familiar interface.” Mashable declared the platform Twitter’s “latest rival.”
