Haven has grown from 500 to 1,200 registered users. That is a 2.4× increase, and it happened faster than we planned for. Here is what we have learned so far, and what it tells us about what comes next.
Why people join
When we ask new users why they signed up, three answers come back almost every time.
First, they are tired of hiding. Mainstream dating apps work for a lot of people. They do not work well for anyone whose status is going to come up as a disclosure somewhere in the first few conversations. On Haven, that conversation has already happened. Everyone you match with is HIV+, HSV+, or HPV+. The status is shared context, not a burden carried alone.
Second, they want to meet people nearby. Distance is a real problem in HIV+ dating. Most of the well-known HIV dating apps are US-centric and quietly dominated by users in a handful of cities. Haven is built specifically for South Africa, with GPS-verified profiles so the person you match with is genuinely in your province, not 8,000 km away.
Third, they want community, not just dates. About half of our users say they came for dating and stayed for the community chats. HIV, HSV, and HPV each have their own group chat, and the level of conversation there is something you do not find on general social platforms.
What the growth told us
The jump from 500 to 1,200 users brought three lessons we did not expect.
Word of mouth is the primary channel. The invite system — where existing users share a code and both sides get tokens — is responsible for a large share of new signups. People are not finding Haven through advertising. They are being told about it by friends.
Privacy controls are the retention driver. When we compared users who engaged with the visibility settings against those who did not, the ones who configured their privacy controls were significantly more likely to still be active 30 days later. This makes sense: the more control a person has over who sees their status, the safer they feel using the app.
Community chats drive more engagement than discovery. Users who joined an HIV, HSV, or HPV chat spent roughly twice as much time in the app as users who only browsed profiles. This was a surprise — we thought dating would be the draw. Turns out community is.
What we got wrong
We underestimated how important privacy controls would be. Our first version gave users a single toggle: profile visible or profile hidden. That was not enough. People want granular control. They want to hide their profile from people younger than a certain age. They want to hide it from specific health statuses. They want to lock their photos behind Premium, or reveal only two of them and hide the rest. We rebuilt the visibility system around this feedback, and it is now one of the features users mention most often.
We assumed users would want to send WhatsApp messages immediately. They do not. Most people want to chat in-app for a while before they hand over a phone number, and they want to control exactly who sees that number when they do. So we added phone visibility controls: nobody, only matches, only pending requesters, or both. The default is now the most restrictive option that still lets matches talk.
"I signed up expecting to be the only person here. I was not." — new Haven user, Johannesburg
What comes next
Three priorities over the next six months.
Moderation at scale. 1,200 users is manageable with a small team. 5,000 is not. We are investing in better tools: faster report triage, more context for moderators, and clearer escalation paths for the highest-priority categories like child safety and harassment.
Better discovery. We want to make it easier for people to find the specific kind of connection they are looking for. That means better filters, better matching signals, and fewer dead-end profiles.
More community. Stories, groups, and event listings. We want Haven to be more than a dating app. We want it to be a place where the HIV+ community in South Africa actually spends time.
Thank you
To the 1,200 people who signed up: thank you. You took a chance on a small app built by people you have never met, on a topic most companies avoid. We are building this for you, and we are listening.
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