Bloom App and Gardener Launch Party

We announced the Bloom App and Gardener launch party only two days ahead, and about 40 people still showed up. There were no special speakers or program. We invited our community to one room, showed them the new app first, and did a group Q&A. It was a very "us" kind of evening. Thank you to everyone who came in person to share opinions, and to everyone who has been leaving feedback on Discord.

We've often called ourselves community beginners and stressed that we started without much of a clear vision or goal. Now that we're more than five months in, I don't think that excuse works anymore. I've been thinking a lot about how we need more structured operations and a setup that lives up to what people expect when they come to us. The app is the first step. With it we wanted to (1) bring scattered information into one place, and (2) lay the groundwork so that any member, not only the organizers, can host events or Mixers (our small curated meetups) for the Bloom community.

A lot of you told us things like "You can push through on passion at first, but this is close to volunteer work, so for it to last you need a healthy reward structure," and "So many communities flash for a moment and disappear. I hope Bloom doesn't."

I know how hard it is to carve out a weeknight after work. So thank you again to everyone in the Bloom community who keeps showing up. And deep thanks to our six Gardeners: Minjae Lee, Jeongmin Kang, Jaemin Yu, Changwon Jeon, Sangmin Lee, and Jueon Kim. We'll be learning from and leaning on them a lot. Sometimes they'll give us objective, constructive feedback from an outside perspective, and sometimes they'll grow alongside us as colleagues. Once operations settle a bit, we plan to recruit a second cohort of Gardeners.

Last, please check out app.bloomworld.ai. Join the waitlist on the website and we'll open access in order. For now, I'd like the people who came tonight and the Gardeners to share the invites. Thank you again to everyone who came!

All of Bloom, in one app

With Luma, Discord, and the blog, Bloom news was scattered all over the place. People asked where on Discord event announcements even get posted. Others said they'd been reading event recaps, but by the time they went to sign up, the event was already over. At first I wondered how we'd ever manage all of it. More than five months in, we decided it was time to organize things and deliver our content officially, so we put the blog, YouTube, events, and Mixers into one app.

I started building it on a Monday and it took about two days. The iOS and Android apps are still in review, so we opened it as a web app first. If you add it to your home screen from the browser, you can use it like an app. This is my first app, so I know developers may find it clumsy and designers may find it lacking in style. So I promised to treat it as something we build together and to apply your feedback right away. The whole time I was building it, I could feel how much better AI has gotten, and I had a lot of fun.

Feedback goes to the new app feedback channel on the Bloom Discord. If you post it with a screenshot, AI reads it and runs the fix, so your feedback flows into the app automatically. We emailed the web app address to everyone who came that night.

"It looks like a fortune-telling app," so we added photos

When you first sign up, the app plays an onboarding video. Someone asked how we made it, so I put it up on the screen and explained. AI made both the video and the copy. The copy was a little cringey at first, so I tried to fix it, but my version was even weirder, so I left it alone.

The inspiration was 222, a US app backed by Y Combinator. You fill out an application saying what you want, and they put together a curated small gathering for you each time. Their vision is to bring back chance encounters. It's so close to Mixer that we used it as a benchmark when we built Bloom Mixer. You can only sign up with a US phone number, but their onboarding video grabs you instantly.

I took that video, gave it to Claude 5.5, and kept telling it this is what I want. The first result was a fairly boring screen with just twinkling stars. Junsu Kim, who runs Bloom with me, said it looked like a saju (Korean fortune-telling) app, so we added photos, and the video felt more real. With one reference, all of our Bloom blog posts, and an explanation of our concept, the copy and video came out right away, and it even picked the background gradient on its own. The promo video at the end of the slides came from me only asking it to include the onboarding. I never asked for a promo, and it made one anyway. I was stunned watching it.

Starting as a closed network

The app is invite-only partly because we're still in a closed beta doing QA. But if you ask what edge this app has over Luma and countless other apps, the honest answer is not the features. It's the members in this room. So I said I want to grow it around people who have come to events often and people who made time to be here tonight, while protecting the quality.

Invites go first to people who came that night and people who come to events often. We haven't opened access yet for people who have rarely or never come. Gardeners got a generous 10 invites each, and people at the party got 5 each. If you know someone you'd like to see here, bring them in with one of those invites. We designed it to start as a closed network, settle in, and then open up more widely.

I deliberately didn't explain how to send an invite. If I have to explain it for you to find it, the app isn't intuitive, so I wanted you to find it yourselves. Same with your personal QR code. Features matter, but the app is only a tool for helping our community grow, and I asked everyone to give feedback from that angle.

We ask the Gardeners before we plan

Gardeners are the people who help tend the garden called Bloom. More people applied than we expected, 55 in total. We looked at their applications and other things and picked six, trying to bring in as wide a mix of people as possible. When I asked them to share their vision and ambitions, everyone avoided eye contact, but one by one they came up and talked about why they applied and what they plan to do.

Before we put together programs, we'll ask the Gardeners first what they think, and we plan to rely heavily on their outside view of things the organizers can't easily see. That doesn't mean we'll only listen to the Gardeners. We made this event specifically to hear from more people, so I asked everyone to send lots of constructive feedback in whatever way is comfortable, on Discord or by DM.

I've heard from Gardeners that they feel hesitant about posting their opinions on Discord. But Discord isn't the organizers' bulletin board. It's everyone's channel. Unless it's something heavily gambling-related, we want people to be able to post even ads. I hope people see the app as an extension of the same wish: a place where anyone can talk freely.

Because insights from people are precious

Jeongmin Kang first found the community while job hunting.

I'd been wrestling with LLMs so much that one day I was exhausted and came out to the community. I felt the insights you get from people here are really precious, so I kept coming, and I got lucky enough to become a Gardener.

They said they hadn't prepared any ambitions, but what they shared on the spot followed from that. They've gotten so much insight here that they're shifting from job seeker to aspiring founder. Their biggest goal is 10,000 subscribers on the YouTube channel they run, and they closed by asking everyone to subscribe.

Minjae Lee has used AI since ChatGPT first came out. They now handle cosmetics OEM and ODM in an overseas sales team, and with how fast things are moving they use AI in all sorts of ways. What they always wondered was how other people outside their own field use AI. Looking for the answer, they went from meetup to meetup found on Danggeun (Korea's big neighborhood marketplace app) and Luma. The first time they came to Bloom, they heard a session about San Francisco and thought, this is it.

Through networking I got a ton of insight, and I heard a lot about how people use AI outside the field I knew. I thought, I need to come here every day. Well, not every day, but every time.

Jaemin Yu said they'd probably be the most different from the people introduced before them. They've worked in marketing communications at a mobility company and are now in grad school studying a lot of AI, but outside their day job they care most about startups, art tech, and arts and culture, and have lots of friends in those worlds. At a big company, security rules mean AI tools don't even run on work computers, so they always envied friends who put AI to work in their jobs.

Following those friends around is how they found Bloom. Jaemin studied marketing and fashion and cares about the meaning behind a brand. To them, Bloom, with its cute character and a name that means blossoming, felt like a place where people who aren't comfortable with AI can still walk in easily. They introduced themselves as maybe the worst at AI in the room: a non-developer and a total liberal arts, art-world person. To set themselves apart from the other Gardeners, they're doing a content series called "Gardener Diary."

It's a record of a non-developer who knows nothing learning one thing at a time and solving their own work problems. They've gotten so hooked that they're up until almost dawn these days automating things. When the invite arrived at dawn the day before, they happened to be working and sent feedback right away.

Traditional art fields are still really conservative about AI, and no one there can use it well. They don't know what Claude Code is. Nobody knows how.

Jaemin said they want to be someone who brings AI closer to people, and especially someone who can help the art world, where AI is still unfamiliar.

Giving back what I received

Sangmin Lee opened by saying it felt like they should be holding a drink, not a coffee cup, but somehow they ended up standing there with coffee. Sangmin is a software engineer six years into their career, and a big part of that career was built through communities. Even the offer that recruited them came through a community.

Over six years I've received so much through communities. I got so much from great colleagues and seniors around me that I decided it was time for me to share too, and that started with giving talks.

They work hard to help members of other communities too, and they applied to be a Gardener because they wanted to share what they can at Bloom, which is still new. Going forward they plan to research what we all need to grow together and share it here.

Changwon Jeon said they checked Luma and found they'd come to Bloom 27 times, so they figured they were picked for the count more than for anything special. They're an AI researcher at an SI (systems integration) company. Research is mostly solo work and they always meet the same kinds of people, so they started coming out to get a slightly different view. At an after-party for one event they got talking with me, and they say that's when they got hooked.

When the Gardener recruitment came out, I figured someone else would do a great job. Then suddenly Wonjun asked me, "Aren't you going to apply?" and I thought, "Should I?" and did.

Changwon has met all kinds of people at Bloom, from people at sister companies in the same group to people they'd normally never cross paths with. Rather than chasing results, they want to help where they can, share, and act as a bridge so people connect better.

Jueon Kim handles DevOps and backend at Toss (a major Korean fintech) and used to work in MLOps. They first came to Bloom to meet people interested in AI. Once they came, they found Bloom was a rare thing compared with other communities: it runs well, and it's free yet hosts sessions of a much higher level than paid ones. They wanted to watch how the organizers work, learn, and help, so when the Gardener opportunity came up, they applied.

We're on the verge of AGI, so everyone's thinking hard about what to do once the moat of being able to build things collapses.

To answer that in their own way, Jueon is building a media presence, like a YouTube channel, that carries their own vision.

Real names or anonymous shapes what a community becomes

After the introductions, we took questions about the app and the community. The first one was about names. The person asked whether the app would run on real names or let people enter whatever name they want. They had used their real name, and pointed out you could also start with real-name verification.

Whether you go anonymous or real-name, I think that alone changes the character of the community a lot.

I hadn't thought about how a name ties into identity. We don't do real-name verification yet, but so far not a single person has signed up anonymously. I asked whether they meant verifying through PASS (a Korean phone identity app) or Kakao on your phone, and said I'd think it over.

Someone who signed up the moment they got the invite said every community has its own character and draws people who fit it, so they had no opinion on the direction. Then they shared something that happened when they signed up for next week's Lovable event.

I signed up on Luma and got approved. You'd asked us to test the features too, so I signed up for next week's event in the app as well, and I got registration confirmations from both.

Some people will use the app, some Discord, some Luma, so they suggested automating things behind the scenes so that whichever way you come in, it all lands in one channel. This connected to the earlier real-name point. To prevent duplicate registrations, the email on Luma and the email you signed up for the app with need to match, but people may use different emails. If we set a rule in advance, people signed up in different places would link automatically and duplicates wouldn't happen.

We can't drop Luma completely, but I'd been wanting to pull things into the app where possible, so this was welcome feature feedback. Someone else chimed in that Luma offers an API, so it shouldn't be hard. It does have an API, and if the emails match we can cross-check, so I said we'd contact anyone with duplicate registrations separately and sort it out. I plan to knock this out with AI.

Discord stays, and the app grows into an offline LinkedIn

Asked what happens to Discord once the app is running, I said it stays as is for now. Global companies like Anthropic, OpenAI, and Lovable all run Discords. I'd never used Discord before and found it awkward at first, but no matter how good AI has gotten, building our own Discord would be overkill. For running events, we often co-host with companies like Higgsfield and Genspark and receive credits from them, and Discord is much more convenient for those announcements.

For now I think of the app as Luma, Mixer, and a content library combined, and we're adding DMs, Remember-style connections (Remember is a popular Korean business card app), and QR check-in. If I'm being greedy, I want to make this app something like an offline LinkedIn. You only know whether someone is your kind of person after you meet them in person. So after an event, you'd choose in the app whether you want to keep meeting this person or whether once was enough. We're also thinking about a way to make sure you don't run into someone at the next event if you felt you didn't click.

Now members host their own Mixers

Until now, we've hosted every Bloom event and Mixer ourselves. From here on, we want you to be able to host events and Mixers directly in the app. If you have a topic you want to talk about or a place you'd like to gather, anyone can open a Mixer. It doesn't even have to be about AI. If you love board games, host one around board games.

After I finished talking, we turned the lights on, moved to the sofas in the back, introduced ourselves, and talked. Once you connect with someone in the app you can see their info, so I encouraged people who met for the first time that night to connect. We'll reflect as much of what came up that night as we can before launch.

Originally written in Korean on Brunch, October 2, 2026.