Kizuner - Do What You Love
Social platform connecting people through shared hobbies and activities, enabling users to find activity partners and build meaningful connections.
The Challenge
People with niche hobbies — bouldering, urban sketching, chess, trail running — often struggle to find local partners who share the same interest level and availability, leaving activities either done alone or abandoned entirely.
The Solution
Built a location-aware mobile app that matches users by specific hobby, skill level, and schedule, with in-app chat and event coordination tools that take the friction out of organising a first meet-up.
Kizuner is a hobby-matching social app that helps people turn passive interests into active social experiences. Whether you want a running partner for Saturday mornings, someone to hit the climbing wall with after work, or a group to join for a weekly board game night, Kizuner surfaces the right people nearby and provides the tools to connect with minimal friction.
Challenge
Existing social apps optimise for follower counts and content consumption rather than real-world activity. Finding a specific type of activity partner — someone at the same skill level, available at the same time, within a practical distance — required trawling through Facebook groups, Reddit threads, and Meetup events with inconsistent results. The product challenge was building a matching experience that felt as effortless as swiping on a dating app but was oriented entirely around shared doing rather than shared browsing.
Solution
Kizuner uses a card-based discovery interface where each profile shows a user’s listed hobbies, skill levels, and typical activity windows. Firebase powers real-time matching and in-app chat, with Firestore listeners ensuring messages arrive without polling. Google Maps integration shows activity proposals on a map, letting users see where and when a potential partner wants to meet before committing to a conversation. Redux manages complex UI state across the discovery, chat, and event coordination flows, keeping the app responsive on lower-end devices common in the target markets.
Key Features
- Hobby-based matching with skill-level and schedule filters for precise partner discovery
- Card-based discovery interface with swipe-to-connect interaction model
- Real-time in-app chat powered by Firebase Firestore with read receipts and media sharing
- Activity proposal system with Google Maps location picker and time coordination
- Skill level profiles for each hobby to match beginners with beginners and veterans with veterans
- Group activity mode for organising multi-person events around shared interests
- Push notifications for new matches, messages, and upcoming activity reminders