Moldi — turning proximity into a conversation
A mobile product for meeting people nearby. Putting people on a map is the easy part; the real design problem is making a stranger worth replying to.
The problem underneath the idea
Proximity is not a hard technical problem. Knowing who is nearby is a solved question, and any number of products can show you a map of strangers. What is hard is the step immediately after: getting one of those people to feel like someone worth saying hello to, and getting the person on the other end to feel safe enough to reply.
That reframes the whole product. If the bottleneck is trust rather than reach, then the features that matter are not the ones that show you more people faster. Moldi is built around that reading — a safety-first way for adults to discover people nearby and start real conversations.
Three steps, deliberately
The flow is explicitly three steps — discover, match, chat — designed for clarity, pace and safety rather than volume. Discovery is shaped by intent and relevance, and by what the product calls conversation-ready context: enough to have something to say, rather than a face and a distance.
Matching on mutual interest is the pivot. It creates a clearer signal so people can move forward without endless low-context swiping — which is the failure mode the whole category is known for. The goal is to make discovery feel relevant, matching feel intentional, and chat feel natural enough to keep going if the conversation is actually there.
Safety as architecture, not a settings page
The clearest design decision in the product is where safety lives. Reporting and blocking are available in-app across both profile discovery and chat — not buried in an account menu reached after something has already gone wrong. The principle the product states is that safety tools should be visible before they are needed.
Around that sit the structural pieces: adults eighteen and over only, applied across public policy, account lifecycle and moderation standards; escalation pathways through support for harassment, impersonation and abuse; and public child safety and CSAE reporting standards for store and policy compliance.
The public policy pages are part of the product rather than paperwork attached to it. Published expectations are verifiable ones, and being able to check the rules before you trust a platform is itself a feature. The strongest safety posture is not only reacting after a problem appears — it is helping people set boundaries early and understand the rules that shape the space they are in.
Why this one matters to me
Moldi is the project where something I had been turning over for a long time stopped being a conversation and became an app that people can download and open. Plenty of ideas survive indefinitely as ideas. This is the one that had to survive contact with app stores, policy review and real users, which is a completely different test.