The Vergecast - Solo Acts: Raluca Pop, founder of Hive Social

Episode Date: February 20, 2023

This is episode one of our Vergecast mini-series "Solo Acts", which features people who are working independently to create great things on the internet, hosted by Ashley Esqueda. Today, Ashley talks with Raluca Pop, founder of the social media app Hive Social, which was created when Raluca was only 19. Ashley and Raluca discuss the challenges of building a social media app from scratch in the world of Big Tech, what happens when you need to address problem like a mass influx of users and security issues, and working with such a small team. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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dropping May 14th. Tap in with us. Welcome to the Vergecast, the flagship podcast of Twitter competitors. I'm your friend Alex Cranz. And today we're starting a mini-series called Soloax, which will feature interviews from people who work independently to create great things on the internet. Most of the time, we talk about tech in terms of a handful of big gigantic companies

like meta, Twitter, Netflix, all of those guys. But some of the most interesting stuff we find online is the product of a single person. sometimes even in their spare time. In this series, we'll get to know these people, the tech they use to get stuff done, and the obstacles they face trying to compete with the giants. So for the next five Mondays on the Vergecast,

our friend Ashley Escana will be curating and hosting these interviews and sharing with us what she's learned. Hello, Ashley. I have to learn something. You've hopefully learned. I'm going to be learning stuff. I feel like you've learned a lot. I have.

I really have. These people are all so fascinating and delightful, really. You've done a bunch of these interviews so far. Today we're talking to, you're talking to the folks at Hive. Yes, I am talking to the founder of Hive Social, Riluka Pop, otherwise known as Cassandra Pop. Sometimes she goes by Cassandra. And she is a person who launched a social media platform because she did not see the social media she wanted to see in the world. Yes. She decided to launch that when she was, she decided to learn to code. launch a social media site at 19. Wow. So that's pretty amazing. That is super amazing. And Hive, I feel like we talked about a lot in those early days of the Twitter implosion.

It got a lot of followers then? Yeah. Shortly after Elon Musk took over Twitter, there was sort of an, I call it a pseudo-exodus because I feel like we're all still on Twitter. Yeah, I was like, I'm still there. We're all still there. But everybody was kind of looking for alternatives to at least try. And one of the ones that I had stumbled upon amongst others was Hive Social.

It feels like a mixture of old school MySpace, a little sprinkle of old school MySpace, because you can set to music to your profile page to automatically play, which I know is like a feature a whole bunch of people really liked, including myself. But it's also, you know, you can post photos, you can post things that look like tweets. I can just post text. And so it's kind of, you know, it kind of wants to be a little bit of everything, wants to give people a little bit of everything. I mean, I used it and then I stopped using it because it broke down a lot. But it sounds like when you only have one or two developers, it's a little more of a challenge. I think at the time of that massive influx of users, they had three people working there.

So there were definitely some challenges. And Riluka talks about that in the interview. Oh, well, let's just go to the interview then. And in a little bit, I'm going to be back to ask you some more questions. All right. Hi, Ruluka. Thanks for being here today. Hi, Ashley.

Thank you for having me. I'm really excited to be here. Well, I am excited to talk to you because in the wake of some pretty big changes across some of the most popular social media apps, users seem to be seeking alternatives that better suit their desired experiences, like more and more. And one of those competitors is your app, Hive Social. Ruluka, can you tell our listeners a little? little bit more about what Hive Social is and also how it started. So HiveSsocial is a social media app that I self-coded and

developed beginning in the later part of 2019. So I started to teach myself how to code in June of 2019. And the very first version was launched in October later that year. So that's how it started. I was still working full-time and I was also in college full-time. So it was definitely a crazy balance to try and maintain. I ended up bringing a developer on and a designer just to help out because it was just so much to try and do by myself from the UX design doing that by myself to the coding by myself. So definitely having extra hands helped a lot. And then I know a lot of people frame Hive as this competitor to Twitter now, but I think it's so much more unique in a standalone app to just be a competitor in general. Because that's why I ultimately made it, I just noticed that there is that

downward market trend with other apps, and I wanted to fill that market demand. Now, just so everybody is aware of this, you started learning how to code and you launched your very own social media platform at 19 years old. Is that that's right, right? Yeah. Yeah. Okay. I think some people would say, including myself, the audacity, the nerve, it's just really, that is something to wake up one day and think to yourself, um, I've, had it with these social media sites. I'm just going to make my own. Walk me through that thought process. I mean, what prompted you to do this? Well, I actually started noticing, again, that downward trend as a senior in high school, but I hadn't started learning how to code or

program or anything. It was just something that I noticed that I started wishing that certain apps had XYZ and other people had similar complaints. And I was just waiting for that like next big social media app that other people were also waiting for. And I just got tired of waiting for. I was like, you know what? I might as well try and create my own. And so I started very carefully looking through what exactly I wanted to be in the app. And I just went from there. And what do you think feature-wise makes Hive unique or sets it apart from other social media platforms that are out there right now? I think the customization really sets it apart right now. Like, you have your music feature that people really love because you get to express your music taste in that way. And every stream also counts

towards your favorite artists total for the year. You can do color themes. People love the zodiac signs and the pronouns that they can have on the profile. I think the Discover page is also super fun for people because you just get to find all sorts of new content on there. In your profile itself, you can also have asks, which is also very personal for creators because then it's like if you're on the platform, for example, and I want to ask you a question. And I want to ask you a question, than I can. And it's a direct interaction. That's also a lot more personal, too. So I think those combined features make it super fun for people. It does seem like there are a lot of bits and pieces from previous social media platforms that have either come and gone or that still exist that

have found their way into Hive Social. Now, I'm assuming a lot of these features did not exist when you originally launched the app. So what did that version of Hive look like compared to today? That version was very bare-bones skeleton. I think if people saw the very first version compared to today's, they'd be like, wow, like you actually had the balls to launch that. I mean, it was not as modern or a clean cut or aesthetically pleasing as the design today. You still had your music feature. That was still a part of it. But things like asks were just not there. Polls were not there. Again, it was just a very bare-bone skeleton app compared to today's. And because you launched this shortly after you started learning how to code for yourself,

tell me about the actual process of building Hive. So my process was literally trying to find coding tutorials online, which might sound super silly, but I found UDEMI. Shout out to them. They have a ton of tutorials and courses that other people make and then you can buy them. And this is non-adder sponsorship. It's literally what I used because I didn't have any other resources. I never took college classes or anything for computer science. So, oh, I did some research. I knew I needed to use X code to code because I was just making an ILS version at first. And then the easiest language, I guess, to learn with that was Swift. I was using Swift 4 at the time. So I just typed in Swift 4 and Firebase because I was also researching different databases.

I settled on that one. And a bunch of tutorials came up. I bought a couple. And then I would sit there and I would watch the video in like one end of the screen, and then on the other, I'd have Xcode open, and I would just literally they would say something, and then I would code it. And I remember being super excited because I made my first text box, and I didn't do anything. It didn't even have like any words in it to say, like,

oh, enter your username or something. It was just a box. And I remember taking a picture, and I sent it to my sister-in-law. And I was like, look, I made a rectangle. It's a box and it's there. You can't do anything. You can't type in it.

But like, I did it. So I think that. part was easy, I guess. But again, I did literally have guidelines that I was following. I did make a mistake, though. So after I brought my developer on board and he took a look at the code, I still have his text message. He had said that it was impressive because I had hard coded everything. I didn't know what the hell that meant. So I asked him to elaborate, he's like, well, most developers use storyboard. Like that's a lot easier because then you can just, I guess, attach functions to whatever you create visually. And I was like, I could have done that this entire time because I was coding

every single line, including the sizing, the point sizes and the colors and everything and emptying the assets. When this whole time I could have been using the storyboard and that would have been so much easier, would have saved you so much more time. And the time spent on it, I know some people wondering like, oh, well, you started coding it and then you launched it in October, right? And so that's the, from June to October, it's about four or five months. They say it's such a short time. And it really is, but because it was the summer, I didn't have school at that time. So I was just working full time. I'd get up around 7 a.m., come home by 3.30 to 4.30 p.m. to literally 3 or 4 a.m. the next night. Or sometimes I just wouldn't even sleep, and then I would just go to work

and, like, repeat. So they were very long days and long hours coding every single day. My dad would have to remind me to eat or sleep or drink water. And it's like, no. I want to do this because once you're in that zone, like, you're so passionately or obsessed with it, you don't want to stop or like lose your train of thought or anything. So that was my process, was just locking myself in my room that summer and just coding it every single night, every single day. I think it's fair to say that when I fall into an internet rabbit hole, it does not normally end in a social media platform getting created. Usually I just have watched too many videos on YouTube or read too many articles or fallen into some subreddit that I wasn't

aware of previously and I get obsessed with. So kudos to you for that. We're going to take a quick break here, but when we come back, I'll talk to Berluka about what it was like when people started flocking to hive social looking for an alternative to Twitter. Support for this show comes from Shopify. Every thriving, successful business has to start somewhere. A good place to start is a relatively simple question. What if, given the right tools, I've really put my all into this. One tool that can help grow your sprouting business to new heights is Shopify. Millions of businesses around the world rely on Shopify for e-commerce.

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That's grammarly.com. That's grammarly.com. Okay, and we're back with my interview with Ruluka Pop, the founder of Hive Social. So the real kind of change points for Hive Social is October and November of this past year. So Elon Musk takes over Twitter. Everybody out there is either super excited about it or super not excited about it and looking for an exit. And one of the apps that people turned to was Hive. that could not have been easy.

That had to have been a challenge for an app that at that time employed three people. Is that right? Yeah, three people, I think, up to five. Threes of people, almost. You've got almost threes of people working on the app. So you have this massive user rush, and there were some complications. I remember I signed up for Hive, and I remember seeing a lot of folks saying that usernames could be doubled up. And there were some bugs and challenges because of the mass

influx of users. I would love to hear you walk me through your side of that experience. Yeah. So that experience completely caught us of guard. We've had some growth spurts in the past as well. Normally, it's from something going viral. Like, if people take a screenshot their profile and they share it, somehow, I don't know how it just, it goes viral. So that's exactly what happen this time. It just happened on such a larger scale, whether that was in direct correlation with everything that was going on on Twitter or it just reached the right accounts. I have no idea. But it really exploded. And we were not prepared for that growth or our server wasn't, I guess you could say, because we gained over 150,000 people overnight.

And everyone trying to sign up and making their accounts, that was just so amazing to watch it happen. I didn't sleep for days literally because I was just so excited and I wanted to respond to people. If you get a response from like the hype social account on Twitter, that's most likely me. There's two other people who have access to you, but I'm on there a lot of the time and I try and respond to everyone. So that's what I was doing. I was trying to respond to people and let them know, you know, if they have questions like for example about the duplicate usernames or when the site went down and completely, you know, the servers crashed. That was a kind of panicking moment. At that time, no functions worked. So that's actually how the duplicate username bug came to be because

since the server was down and no functions were working. So like the function to catch that duplicate username and say, hey, like this is a duplicate. You can't use it. That was down too. So then that ended up being a bug. And now I have like over 100 Nicki Minaj's on the app when I know none of them are her. But I mean, that's just one of the things that the server going down had done. And we were working to get it back up. So we were working with the Google team. We ended up bringing on a different developer at that time. And he's still with us. He's super great. So we got it back up that Friday. I think it went down on Thursday. And we brought it up Friday night. And then the wave just kept coming. And we ended up going past two million users when I think we had 600 to 700,000 at that time. Oh, wow. Yeah, that is a pretty big crush on your

systems. Yeah, it really was. I think that the post is still up there. I had taken a screenshot of all the reads that were going on within the server, which is like every time someone does something, we had over, I think over three billion reads. So that was, those were all the function calls going to the server and why it had all come down. So those were really wild numbers to see. But I was really excited about it because that kind of proved what I had originally thought, like all those years back that, hey, there is this downward market trend. There's this market demand. People are going to want a new app. And again, whatever correlation it has, as to anything else going on out there

or if people just really want something new. I mean, they really showed out for the app and signing up and supporting it. So it was just really awesome to see it come to life. Were there specific communities that you noticed in the data for users that really sort of helped bring in more users because it feels like there are some, like,

real key communities in fandom that were extremely excited about hive. Oh, yeah. The K-pop community is what actually kicked off those viral posts. So shout out to them. And then that just somehow turned into the gaming community coming on board, which opened the doors for cosplayers and then the beauty community. And then the Star Wars community and Star Trek community were huge on there as well. I know some notable gaming community specifically that gone on. I think we're Call of Duty and then Bungee. So, which was actually really funny because maybe you can see

but I have an Xbox back there and I play Destiny myself which Bungie had created. So it was just kind of a full circle moment for me to have loved the game so much and then have the actual community come on to Hive. So it was just really cool to connect with the people from that gaming community.

But I would definitely say those big three would be at originally K-pop and then gaming, beauty, cosplay and I think the fifth one I would have to say is music. Since, you know, Hive supports music artists, like I mentioned, the streams from the profile, music accounts towards their overall total. That was really big on there, too.

So we noticed a lot of hip-hop, pop, anything that's trending you would see or hear either on the radio or other apps. It's very similar following those trends on Hive. For listeners who are unaware of Hive's profile features, one of them is the ability to, much like MySpace used to have, set a profile song that plays whenever someone opens up your profile. And then there is a monetization ability to purchase additional or unlock additional music slots up to four songs. And so I thought that was a very interesting way for Hive to monetize because it is a free app. It is free for users to use.

And I am really curious about the future of Hive in that regard. becoming profitable, being able to monetize in a way that will enable you to hire additional developers to continue to work on all of the things that Hive has going on. I would love to hear about Hive's plans in, let's say, the next year. Like, what does Hive look like in a year for you? Hive has some really big things planned in the next year. We've partnered with a lot of different brands that I'm really excited to talk about later on as well. And the brands, the influencers, you'll see those more. But Hive has always been an authentic social media app. That's how I kind of refer to because a lot of the content that's posted on there is very genuine. It's raw and organic or it could be very

curated if you have a specific niche or community that you belong to. So I think having a creator economy where we support those creators is definitely in the works. For example, one feature that's out there. And actually, the term that our users or our besties have called it is HypeStreams, which is basically live streaming. We want to introduce that on the app and then allow users to, much like TikTok, give gifts through that app that then those creators could convert to cash and then withdraw that for themselves. And I think a percentage from that would be lower than other apps because we understand that, I used to be a micro-influencer, so I know how important that that money is, that cash flow is,

we wouldn't take a lot from them because it's their full-time job, it's what they're trying to do, and I want to support them in that way. So I think a live streaming would be one with those in-app purchases, the gifts, and then also in-app subscriptions to different members' profiles.

So if you've got exclusive content, you want to show behind the scenes for the podcast, for example, then you could put your account behind like a paywall. It's whatever price you want it. We'll probably have a limit. I don't think people are going to be putting like a $500 a month to see this profile. I don't know. Some people will pay a lot of money for access to certain people.

Maybe we'll test it with like a small batch and we'll see. But that that's an idea that we've been twined around with because I think it is really fun to see behind the scenes exclusive content. And that's another way for creators to get closer with our audience members. So those two revenue streams are going to be coming to Hive. And again, those brand partnerships that I had mentioned, you'll see them throughout the app because I think Hive will eventually have ads. And before anyone freaks out, Hive did have ads before the shutdown and all that. We used to have one ad every like seven posts, I think, on the home feed.

And now we're just kind of reframing that since we do have these brand partnerships now. They're very minimally invasive. They looked exactly like posts. So it never really bothered people. That was the feedback that we got from the beta group. So now with these brand partnerships, instead of having more randomized ads through Google AdMod, because that's what we were using,

you'll probably see paid advertising from these brands out there. So I'm really excited to bring those campaigns onto Hive. I'm very picky with those as well, so nothing low quality at all. Okay, we're going to take one more break, and when we return, I'll check in with Alex Kranz and then more of my interview. with Raluca.

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Fortune 500. And that's because it's a platform built by developers for developers. MongoDB, it's a great freaking database. Start building at MongoDB.com slash build. All right. We're back from break. I've got to interrupt you. I'm sorry. I got questions.

I'm enjoying this interview, but I also have some questions. Because before the break, Ruluka referenced this big shutdown. And for those of us who don't know, I've deactivated their servers temporarily last fall after some researchers found what looked like some security issues with the app. Ashley, can you kind of tell me more about that? Yeah. So this group of researchers had basically posted a report saying there are a ton of issues here. All of these issues allow any attacker to access all data on Hive.

Oh, boy. Which is not great. And that includes private posts, private messages, shared media, even deleted DMs. Ooh. So sliding into the DMs and deleting not gone forever. No. Everything lives forever on the internet. So yeah, it was a Berlin-based.

Security Collective, and they said this also includes private email addresses, phone numbers entered during login. So not great. And so they took down the servers entirely. The app was still up. You could refresh, but it would just refresh to the exact same place that the app was in. The place your app was in when you opened it, when they shut down the servers. But the service was actually down for two weeks to fix these security risks, which in the world of social media is an actual lifetime. it feels like. Yeah. You know, that begs the question. And I think everybody knows the answer. It's a rhetorical question. What do people do when something doesn't work?

They stop using it. Yeah. So it's definitely a really difficult problem to have when you have such a small staff and the inability to remain live while you fix all of these issues in a test environment. And so how do you get those people back? Yeah. How do you get those people back? Does Ruluka have an answer for that?

I think she does. I'm curious about this. decision to pull Hive entirely offline for a period of time and how you, as the founder, plan to sort of regain those users? Because obviously there has to have been some drop. Yeah. So regaining the users and the momentum, that's going to come from the brand that we've partnered with and then also influencers later down the line, as well as those extra features that are coming later this year. I think Hive is an ever-evolving app. with, again, very carefully selected features.

I'm the one that makes the final decision on that. So if anything launches and you guys don't like it, blame me fully because I'm the one picking and choosing what to put in the app. So the decision, though, to take it fully offline was actually from that security company that had posted the original article, Zerfors, Shung. I had actually been in communication with them prior to the article, even going live. And the decision that we originally came to was that, they wouldn't post it until the issues were fixed.

And then they posted it anyway. And then we had a phone call afterwards where I told them kind of flat out that, hey, are you guys going to reconfirm that or just confirm that these vulnerabilities were fixed? You kind of threw a grenade and then you ran away and you caused this huge uproar. They did confirm that they would do that for us. But as of yet, I haven't seen anything come out. So I don't really know what's going on with that. I haven't been in contact with them recently.

So that definitely threw a wrench in there because the reason they were going to wait for those vulnerabilities to be fixed, like that's their standard. When they report vulnerabilities on a company, it's usually after they have fixed those issues for the simple common sense reason that, hey, if you disclose these vulnerabilities out there to people, then there's black hat hackers out there that are going to, exploit those. And at that point, it was just mind-blowing to me that they had posted it because now everyone has like a how-to guide on how to exploit those vulnerabilities. And it just wasn't safe for people. I mean, we took full accountability and responsibility for it by fixing them and we were in communication with

them. So for them to have made that decision, it was really kind of devastating because you work for so many years on an app and you try to make everything as perfect as possible. And it was like, my fault for the security vulnerability is even existing. But the fact that they posted and exposed it to those hackers specifically that aren't reading those, they're trying to see which companies have a weaker security framework or system and to steal people's data, it was, again, just devastating. So we decided, you know, now that hackers out there around the world know about all of this, we would rather just take it offline. And again, I know that resulted. in the momentum slowing down because nothing was working within the app.

Everything was just completely locked down. But I decided that was the best thing because I would rather have shut down the app and made that decision versus having people's data actually stolen. So I think that's another confusing point for people is some of them think it was a security breach, but nothing was breach. There was no user data stolen, nothing like that. It was just a security vulnerability report, and we have fixed that all of those since then. And the Google engineering team actually cleared that for us.

We were on a call with them back and forth, and they gave us the green light. And then that's when we had brought it back online. I know a lot of people who had initially tried Hive, obviously there was a great clamoring for an Android app. And then also a desktop app. And the process of those things, I would love to hear a little bit about the process of bringing Hive specifically, to mobile only at this point. And if you have any plans on your roadmap for a desktop version of the app. Oh, yeah. Desktop is going to come later down the line right now. We just want to focus on mobile only because, you know, we did bring the service back online. It's functional. But there's just certain

bugs and there's features that we want to bring on that we really want to dedicate all of our time effort and focus to before diverting that to a desktop app. Since we're such a small team, we want to use, our time and efforts wisely, and we just don't think it's very feasible at this time to add a desktop version onto our plate because that's essentially rebuilding the entire app. So that is going to be tabled until later this year. And then right now we're just focusing mobile only, make that perfect, give everyone a seamless experience, bring those new features on, and then we can focus on desktop. I am very curious about your view of the current state of social media, Do you think that we will see major disruption in that space and how that might happen?

Or will we see more subtle change over the next few years? Like, what's your take on the current landscape? I think major changes are coming because of the current landscape. So I'm a really observant person. I like to read patterns and different trends out there. And just from seeing everyone's reactions to not just the Twitter buyout that happened, but social media in general, I don't think they're happy with it. I see a lot more complaints than not.

A lot of people are very exhausted, I think, from social media because it's not really fun anymore. There's, aside from the aesthetic part with like outdated layouts, whatever, you also just have the culture and environment that are on these apps. Like, for example, you go on Instagram, you know you have to curate this personality. And I know I say have to, you don't need to. But if you want to be someone on that platform or you, you want to showcase a certain lifestyle, you have to curate that personality and kind of become this whole different person when people in real life know you as someone else. On Twitter, you get

on there and you're just angry all the time because you see so many heart wrenching hosts and news on there about different things around the world or different political things that are going on, and it infuriates you. So you've got one on Instagram where you have to be essentially fake. Then you have Twitter where you have to be angry. And TikTok, I mean, you just get on there and you kind of rant about whatever, you make videos and that when you just scroll forever, you laugh and stuff. But even there, there's that pressure to, again, if you want to be a creator on there, you have to consistently post so the algorithm is pushing you. And I think with that landscape constantly changing, different apps are popping up. I know there's other apps and I guess alternatives like Hive,

but I think what sets Hive apart is that we're actually a social media app that's, again, a unique standalone app. We're not clones of anyone else. We have our own different carefully selected blended features that work really cohesively in the app and we're very focused on UI and the user experience. And I think that's what helps us deliver that more raw and organic experience to our users. It's just the fact that we're caring. We're really trying to make an app that people genuinely love. And on that note, if there's someone out there who is not unlike you when you were 19 years old thinking I would like to break out of the systems that I currently operate in and I want to build something. I want to found my own social media platform or something else like that.

What advice do you have for them? And how do you think that your advice is unique to you, especially because you have experienced quite a ride in a very short period of time? So I have two pieces of advice, or three really. The first one is just started. The second one is do not have any fear. And the third one is just find humor and everything. And I'll kind of go through each of those points. So the first one for just starting it. Me personally, I'm a perfectionist. I know if I'm starting something, I'm going to be completely obsessed with it. But I also have this kind of fear that links to the second point where, well, what if I start it and it just sucks? Like what if I'm not good enough. I don't want to start something and have to learn it. I want to start something and already be good at it, which is so, so strange. But if you just start it, that is honestly going to be the biggest hurdle, at least that I've experienced, because you're kind of just sitting there with that trepidation, like, oh, should I really do it? What if it doesn't work? And you kind of think about failure and all those one-of scenarios that are honestly more pessimistic than

optimistic, because I think as humans, we tend to think of just that pathway for ourselves. But if you just started, you're already leaps ahead of other people who are just sitting on the couch, just dreaming about it. My second point to not have any fear, again, from my personal experience, some people that I talk to and my friends are like, you know, your competitors are Zuckerberg and Musk, like, aren't you kind of like afraid of that or what people are saying about you? And I don't, I don't really have any fear about that because I'm not focused on other people. I'm focused on myself. I'm focused on hive and I want it to grow. And it's like, yes, you should always be aware of things that are going on around you or potential

competitors, whatever it is. But be aware, don't be concerned and don't be afraid. And my third point in finding humor and everything, that's honestly what has gotten me to this point because a lot of, I had seen a lot of comments. If he looked through Aaron Greenberg's posts on Twitter when he had posted an article, I think it was from Newsweek. They had used to profile a picture of me. and a lot of people were saying that I was either AI, that I wasn't real, that I was secretly either a Chinese guy in a basement or some Russian spy that was like making the app. So there's a lot of different rumors out there about me and speaking to anyone listening to this podcast, there will probably be a lot of rumors about you too, whether it's articles about you

or if it's people in your real life that are saying stuff about you as well. But you have to find humor in it. So for me personally, when I heard the whole AI and then Chinese guy Russian spy thing, I made a TikTok response. I made a TikTok video response and I just had fun with it. And it got a lot of laughs for me. It was kind of stress-free because so much was going on with the app. I kind of just had that break.

And I was like, I'll just make a quirky little response. And then everyone else loved it too. So as long as you start it, you don't have fear and you find humor and stuff. I think you'll get really far. So that's coming from my own experience with, you know, Hive and everything that's been going on with it. I think that's really good advice. And if you are, in fact, a digital creation and an AI, it's a really impressive one. It's a really impressive one.

You can also just say you built yourself. I built myself. I have programs running in the background. You guys don't see it. I have some wires in the corner. It's hooked up to me as my little charging port. So I appreciate this conversation so much. and I can't wait to see what is in the future for Hives.

So thank you, Ruluka, for chatting with me. Thank you for having me on here. It was super fun talking with you, and I'm glad we got some laughs too. Okay, that is it for the Vergecast. Ashley, thank you so much. I am so very excited for more episodes of this. Because this is the first episode of our Solo Act series. So everybody, you're going to have to tune in and listen to Ashley, talk to people for the next few weeks every Monday.

I hear there's like a Mick Rib situation. that's going to be happening. I will be talking to the founder of the McRib Locator. And it is a fascinating and delightful interview. We're very excited. There you go. This show is produced by Andrew Marino and Liam James. And Brooke Mentors is our editorial director of audio.

The Vergecast is a Verge production and part of the Vox Media podcast network. If you have thoughts, feedbacks, feelings, you can always reach us at the Vergecast at theverge.com. Or you can call the hotline 866-6-Vorge 11. That's 866. Verge 11. We're going to be back on Wednesday, as already said, for an all-new midweek episode of the Vergecast. Until then, stay classy.