I built an app to break the language barrier between people
Imagine meeting someone from Japan, Korea, China or Brazil.
You want to have a normal conversation, but you don't speak the same language.
I started wondering:
Why should language be the reason that conversation never happens?
That question became HEYID.
HEYID is a social app for meeting people from around the world. The main idea is simple: conversations can be automatically translated, so you can write in Polish while someone else writes in Japanese, Korean or another language — and HEYID helps you understand each other.
I'm not a big company with a team of dozens of developers.
I'm an independent developer who decided to build this and see where it could go.
There was a lot to figure out along the way: features, backend, testing, bugs, Google Play, payments, translations, profiles, notifications and all the other things users never see.
But now something pretty exciting happened:
HEYID is finally live on Google Play. 🚀
And I'm starting from zero.
The first users are already finding the app, but now comes the hardest part — building a community that actually wants to come back.
My first goal is 100 real users.
Not 100 random installs.
100 people who genuinely want to meet people from other countries.
That's why I'm posting here.
If you're building your own startup or you're an indie hacker, I'd love to hear your story.
And if you've built a social app before, I'd especially love to hear how you got your first users and what you learned along the way.
This is only the beginning of HEYID. 🌍
The translation layer solves the obvious barrier, but the harder part seems like getting the right people online at the same time.
Curious whether you're seeing more friction around acquiring the first 100 users, or getting those users to come back and actually form conversations.
100 "real" users is the right target — just don't let Play Console redefine it as installs.
I'd freeze feature work for two weeks and only count someone who (1) completed one translated conversation and (2) came back within seven days. Everything else is noise.
IH and random store traffic will give you polite curiosity, not the bilingual people who already hunt language partners. Go where that intent already lives — language-exchange Discords, Erasmus/expat groups, university international clubs — and offer a specific match (e.g. Polish↔Japanese this week), not a generic "social app" pitch. One dense pocket of returning chats beats a thousand cold installs that never open a thread.
If those rooms won't try a single conversation, the product isn't the bottleneck — the promise is. Fix the one-line reason they'd open HEYID tonight before you chase the next hundred.