My friend and I just launched Sparq — an anonymous stranger chat app with interest-based matching. This is the story of how we built it, what broke, what we learned, and the scrappy solutions we used when things didn't go as planned.
What we built and why
Omegle shut down. Every alternative we tried was either full of bots, had terrible mobile UX, or felt abandoned. So we decided to build something ourselves — clean, mobile-first, face verification ,games and actually fun to use.
Sparq matches strangers by shared interest tags. Free users get interest-based matching. VIP users unlock location-based matching — city first, then state, then country. The idea is that when two people share interests or location, conversations actually go somewhere instead of dying in 10 seconds.
The tech stack
