Five months in, we stopped calling ourselves beginners

What was discussed

For a long time Bloom called itself a community beginner, leaning on the fact that we'd started out unpolished and without a clear vision or goal. Five months in, that excuse had run out. People who show up expect something, and meeting that takes a more organized operation and a real structure. Plenty of members had told us as much. You can push through on passion at first, they said, but this is close to donating your talent, so it needs a healthy reward structure to last. Too many communities shine for a moment and then vanish, and they hoped Bloom wouldn't.

The reason for putting this evening on was to show the community the app we'd built as the first step. Bloom news had been scattered across the registration page, Discord and the blog. People asked where event announcements actually went on Discord, and others said they'd read a recap, gone to sign up and found the event already over. So we put the blog, YouTube, events and Mixer into one app, and wanted any member to be able to run an event or a curated Mixer for the community, rather than leaving that to the organizers. We started building on a Monday and it took about two days. The iOS and Android versions were still in review, so it opened as a web app first.

It was our first time building an app, and we said up front that it would look rough to developers and short on taste to designers. We promised to treat it as something we'd build together and to turn feedback around fast. Feedback went to a new app channel on Discord, and if you left a screenshot, AI read it and ran the fix. Someone asked how the onboarding video was made, so we put it on screen and walked through it. The starting point was 222, a US app backed by Y Combinator that curates a small gathering around what you write in an application. We'd used it as a benchmark when we built Mixer.

We fed 222's onboarding video to Claude 5.5 and kept telling it this was the kind of thing we wanted. The first result was a fairly dull screen of twinkling stars. Junsu Kim, who runs Bloom with us, said it looked like a fortune-telling app, so we put photos in and it got more real. Once every Bloom blog post went in with an explanation of our concept, the copy, the video and even the background gradient came straight out. The copy made us cringe a little at first, but our attempt at fixing it was worse, so it stayed. We'd only asked for onboarding, and it also made the promo video at the end of the slides. Watching that, we were floored.

The app opened by invitation only. Part of that was the closed beta, still in QA. The other part was that if anyone asked what edge it had over the dozens of other apps out there, the only honest answer was the members in that room. So the plan was to grow it around regulars and the people who'd made time to come that night, keeping the quality as it widened. Gardeners got 10 invites each and everyone there got 5. We deliberately didn't explain how to send one. If people needed us to explain it, the app wasn't intuitive enough.

Gardeners are the people who tend the garden that is Bloom. Fifty-five people applied, more than we'd expected, and we picked six after reading the applications and weighing a few other things, wanting as much range as we could get. The idea is to ask the gardeners before planning a program and lean on their outside eye for what the organizing team can't see. That didn't mean only listening to them. We'd set up the evening to hear from more people, so we asked for constructive feedback through Discord, DMs, whatever was easiest. When we asked the gardeners for their visions and ambitions, everyone looked away, but one by one they came up front and talked about why they'd applied and what they planned.

Jeongmin Kang first came while job hunting, on a day they were worn out from wrestling with LLMs. What you get from people there felt so valuable that they kept coming back and ended up a gardener. With the insight they've picked up here, they're turning from job seeker to prospective founder, and they named 10,000 subscribers on their YouTube channel as their biggest goal. Minjae Lee, who handles cosmetics OEM and ODM on an overseas sales team, has used AI since ChatGPT first appeared but always wondered how people outside their own domain were using it. They went from meetup to meetup looking for the answer, sat in on a Bloom session about San Francisco, and decided they had to come every time.

Jaemin Yoo has worked in marketing communications at a mobility company and is studying AI in grad school now. Security rules at work keep AI tools from even running on their computer, and a lot of their friends are in startups, art tech and the arts, so they've always envied the ones who have AI wired into their work. Following those friends is how they found Bloom, and with its cute character and a name that means to flower, it felt like somewhere people new to AI could walk into easily. Introducing themselves as a non-developer and a thoroughly humanities person, they write Gardener Diary, a record of learning one thing at a time to work through their own job. They want to be someone who brings AI closer to people, and especially someone who can help the art world, which is still conservative about it.

Sangmin Lee, a software engineer six years in, has gotten so much from communities, including a scouting offer, that they decided it was their turn to give back, and that started with talks. They applied to research what everyone needs to grow and share it at Bloom too. Changwon Jeon, an AI researcher at a systems integrator, counted 27 visits to Bloom. When the gardener call went out they assumed someone else would do it well, until Wonjun asked, "You're not going to?" They want to stand in the middle so people connect better. Jueon Kim, on DevOps and backend at Toss, said Bloom was rare because its free sessions beat paid ones. Their own answer to what comes after the moat around features is gone is a YouTube-style media channel carrying their vision.

When the floor opened for questions, the first one was about names. The person asking whether the app would run on real names or let people type whatever they liked said they'd used their real name, and suggested starting from identity verification. Whether people use handles or real names, they said, changes the character of a community right from there. That a name could connect to identity hadn't occurred to us. There was no verification yet, but so far not one person had signed up under a handle. We asked whether they meant phone-based PASS or Kakao verification, and said we'd think it over.

Someone who'd signed up the moment their invite arrived had registered for the following week's Lovable event on the old registration page, been approved, then signed up for the same event in the app and received confirmations from both. With people coming in through the app, Discord and the registration page, they suggested funnelling everything into one channel automatically. Blocking duplicates means the email has to match on both sides, so agreeing on that up front would link people who'd registered elsewhere. Another person chipped in that the registration platform has an API, so it shouldn't be hard. It does, and with matching emails a cross-check works, so we said we'd reach out to anyone double-registered and sort it out.

Asked what would happen to Discord once the app was running, we said it would stay as it was for now. Anthropic, OpenAI and Lovable all run Discords, and when we co-host with companies like Higgsfield or Genspark and get credits from them, announcing it on Discord is far easier. The app, on the other hand, we wanted to grow into an offline LinkedIn, with DMs, first-degree connections and QR check-in. You only know whether someone fits you by meeting them, so after an event you'd choose whether to keep seeing them, and anyone could open a Mixer on any topic, board games included. Once the talking was done, we turned the lights up, moved to the sofas in back and everyone introduced themselves.