Building BRUH, Part Two: Paperwork, Pivots, First Signups, and the Moment It Started Feeling Real

If you read the first one, you already know the shape of this story: I set out to build a way for people to find real friends nearby, changed direction about five times, and kept going anyway.

This is the part that comes after the idea stops being an idea.

The pivot I am most glad I made

BRUH started as a men-only friend-finding app. That came from something honest — I watched grown men, myself included, quietly lose their friendships to work, moving, breakups, and pride. Nobody organizes anything for you after school ends. I wanted to fix that.

What I did not expect was how fast people outside that first box told me they needed the same thing. Women who had just moved to a new city. Nonbinary folks who were tired of every "community" app pointing them toward dating. People in their forties and fifties who told me, plainly, that they had coworkers and family and no actual friends. Cousins, aunties, neighbors, grandparents who wanted somebody to walk with.

At some point the exclusivity stopped feeling like focus and started feeling like a wall I had built by accident. So I took it down.

BRUH is now an all-gender platonic social platform for adults 18 and over. You tell it who you are open to meeting — men, women, or everyone — and it respects that. It is not a dating app. It is not a hookup app. There is no swiping toward romance, and I have no interest in adding it.

BRUH isn't a gender. It's a vibe. Find your crew.

That line started as a joke in my notes app. Now it is the whole thesis.

Becoming a real company was harder than the code

Here is the thing nobody tells you when you decide to actually do this: the software is the part you control.

I formed BRUH FIND YOUR CREW LLC. Real company, real name, real intent. Then I met the paperwork.

The EIN was the first lesson in patience. The number has been assigned and the correct legal name exists in the IRS documentation — but getting the confirmation letter back in my hands, and getting a human being on the phone to help me retrieve it, has been its own small saga. Long hold music. Disconnects. "Call back during business hours" from a system I called during business hours. Records that exist but take time to line up across systems.

Then Dun & Bradstreet. When I looked up my own business identity, it came back shortened and slightly mismatched — not the full legal name I registered. That matters more than it sounds, because Apple and Google both lean on that record to verify that an organization is who it says it is. So I requested a correction to show BRUH FIND YOUR CREW LLC exactly. As of today, August 21, that correction is requested and still pending. Nothing to celebrate yet, just a ticket in a queue and a founder refreshing a page.

Stripe was the third one. I went through account onboarding and business verification, and got put through a legal-name and tax-ID matching review — the kind where a single character or an abbreviation on one document versus another can send you back to the start. Payments can be processed, and that part works. The payout-side verification is still open while the underlying business records get reconciled. I am not going to tell you it is fully verified, because it isn't yet. I am also not going to pretend it is broken, because it isn't that either. It is in the middle, like most of this.

None of this is dramatic. It is just slow, and it happens on days when you would rather be building. I have learned to keep a paperwork tab open next to my editor and treat both as the job.

Apple, Google, and a stranger who signed up

Apple Developer organization enrollment is in progress. Android and Google Play developer onboarding is in progress too. Neither is approved yet, so let me be exact about it: there is no BRUH app in the App Store or on Google Play right now. BRUH lives on the web, at heybruh.app, and it works on your phone's browser today.

Which brings me to the best twenty seconds of my month.

I was talking to someone about the app — the way you do when you cannot shut up about the thing you are building — and instead of nodding politely, they pulled out their phone and signed up. On the spot. With Apple sign-in, which I had honestly expected almost nobody to use. I had braced for Google or phone. Watching that Apple flow complete for a person I had just met, on a device I did not own, on a website I built at my kitchen table, did something to me that no green test suite ever has.

There were a few other signups around the same time. Small numbers. Real people. I am not going to inflate them into a growth chart, because that would cheapen the only thing that made it meaningful: a stranger could actually get in.

Worth saying clearly, since the words look alike: Apple sign-in working on the website is a completely different thing from Apple Developer approval and native App Store distribution. The first is live. The second is pending.

Shipping in public changed how I work

Somewhere in here I started working through a Shipathon entry — a build-and-ship-it-publicly push with a deadline attached. I am not claiming a win, a sponsorship, a prize, or a finished submission. What I can tell you is what committing to shipping publicly did to my brain.

It killed the endless polish loop. When you know something has to be visible to strangers by a date, you stop rewriting the same component for the fourth time and start asking: is this usable, is this honest, is this safe? Everything that failed those three questions either got fixed or got cut.

I cut a lot. I do not miss most of it.

What is actually built, honestly labeled

I want to be careful here, because founder posts are where features get promised into existence. So: what is live and usable on the site today, and what is foundation work.

Live and usable:

• Discovery with approximate location. You can see people near you as randomized, neighborhood-level pins. BRUH does not hand out anyone's exact coordinates or address, including to me. Distance shows in coarse buckets on purpose.
• Profiles with photos, interests, and privacy controls over what gets shown.
• Friendship messaging — conversations that start from a friend request, not from a stranger's DM slide.
• Friend codes, so you can share a link or QR with someone you meet in person instead of trading handles.
• A visual community Board, Pinterest-flavored, for local ideas and posts.
• BRUH Daily Vibes — a daily affirmation and horoscope card you can actually save and share.
• A dozen genuinely free tools, including a free meetup planner, that work with no account at all.
• This Journal, plus the SEO work and internal AI-assisted content system behind it.
• Subscriptions and BRUH+ founder pricing presentation for the paid tier.

Foundation work, not finished products: group video rooms, the ambassador and invite program, and parts of the Board experience are built but still being hardened. I would rather under-promise those than have you tap something that disappoints you.

I am also not going to guarantee growth or revenue. I have no idea if this becomes big. I know it works, and I know it is honest.

The part I did not plan for

I built this because grown men lose their friends quietly. That was the seed. What it has become is wider than I was imagining at my desk.

It is for the woman who moved for a job and eats lunch alone. For the nonbinary person who is done being funneled into dating apps to find community. For the guy who realized his last real conversation with a friend was eleven months ago. For chosen family. For cousins, aunties and uncles, grandparents, neighbors, people rebuilding after a divorce or a move or a hard year. Adults, 18 and up, looking for their people.

That is a heavier thing to be responsible for than a friend-finding app for guys. I am aware of it. It is also the reason I am still up at 1 a.m. reading IRS documentation and then fixing a layout bug on a phone screen.

I am tired in the specific way that means you are learning everything at once — accounting, verification, payments, privacy engineering, SEO, design, and how to keep believing on a Tuesday. And I am more excited than I have been about anything I have made.

Come see it

If you have read this far, you already understand the assignment. BRUH is free to join, adults 18+, all genders, built for friendship and hangouts — not dating.

[Create your free account](/auth?utm_source=journal&utm_medium=organic&utm_campaign=journal_founder_part_two&utm_content=closing_cta) and find your crew.

And if you missed the beginning, start here: I Built a Social App With AI, Changed Its Focus Five Times, and Now It's Becoming Something Much Bigger.

Part three will probably have more paperwork in it. I will tell you the truth about that too.

— Erik Ruiz, Founder, BRUH FIND YOUR CREW LLC