Hunvagy

Hunvagy is a community platform that connects Hungarians and Hungarian businesses living abroad – with a location-based newsfeed, map discovery and a positive, politics-free community experience.

Mate Karolyi, founder of TRAVLRD and co-founder of Hunvagy, has himself lived abroad for 7 years (Australia, Egypt, Montenegro, and currently Spain). TRAVLRD took part in this project not just as a digital implementation partner, but as a co-founder – from the birth of the concept to the full digital delivery.

Mate built the idea from personal experience: Hungarians abroad help each other almost everywhere, but there was no single shared place where they could easily find one another.

The Challenge

Two interconnected things had to be solved.

The first came up before market entry: the app was still in development when we had to start building the future user base. We didn’t need a traditional “coming soon” page, but a surface that builds real urgency even though the product isn’t available yet, segments subscribers geographically, and creates a sense of exclusivity so that early adopters commit before any usable feature exists – and it was a big success.

The main task, however, was designing the app and the entire design itself: Hunvagy didn’t want to be a traditional social network, but a platform where location is the backbone of the whole experience – the feed, the recommendations and the map all work based on it.

This raised several difficult questions: how can proximity and popularity both show up in the feed, without a popular but distant post disappearing, or a nearby but weak post landing in front of far too many people?

How can personal and business profiles live on the same platform, with separate categories, verification and advertising logic? How can nearby Hungarians and businesses be made discoverable on the map without revealing anyone’s exact home address?

And how can moderation scale so that not every report lands directly on an admin’s desk?

The Solution

First, UI/UX Design and Visual Planning

We designed the entire interface and user experience (UI/UX) in Figma. We paid special attention to a clean, modern look and intuitive usability across both the mobile app and the related interfaces. With the prototypes built in Figma, we were able to fine-tune the visual presentation of the location-based features and the user journeys before development even started.

Location-Based Registration and Profiles

At registration, every user enters their location, and this determines what relevant content they get in the feed and the recommendations.

Besides personal profiles, businesses can also create a business profile – for this, the business has to provide its own location and a category (food and drink, experiences, shopping, services), and verify that it really exists with a Facebook or Google link. A business profile can only exist alongside a personal profile.

Personal, Founder-Voiced Onboarding

Anyone who wanted to join Hunvagy didn’t receive a generic welcome email, but a highly personal, story-driven email sent directly in Máté’s name – with his own emigration story (Australia, language and financial difficulties, then the help of the local Hungarian community). It wasn’t just an introduction: it also laid the foundation for the “why” behind the product, and asked the reader to share their own story too. From the very first moment, this step established the community-minded, trust-based tone that the platform stands for in the long run.

Distance- and Popularity-Based Feed Algorithm

The feed decides how far a piece of content should travel based on the poster’s current position and the post’s popularity. A new post is first shown in a narrow circle; if it gets no reactions, we reduce its reach, but if it gets many reactions, we gradually show it in widening circles – even to very distant users – so it can go “viral.”

A post always uses the location valid at the moment of posting, so if someone is currently somewhere other than where they live, their post is shown to users there.

Map Discovery with Privacy Built In

The map interface, designed in Figma, shows the user’s immediate surroundings and automatically widens the search radius until it finds relevant pins – with a separate layer for people and for businesses. Businesses can be filtered and searched by category, and route planning can be started directly from their profiles. The pins of personal profiles are randomly offset from the real home address, so that nobody’s exact address can be identified.

Networking, Chat and Notifications

Both personal and business profiles can post text, images, videos and links, share content, tag other profiles, and chat with each other. The feed doesn’t only recommend posts, but also potential connections based on proximity and shared interests. The notification system covers every important event: a new comment, like, follower or chat message.

The Hunvagy Account as a Built-In Blog

The platform has an official Hunvagy account that authorized admins can log into. Posts from it appear prominently for everyone and get a unique, easily shareable URL – essentially, this serves as the platform’s blog.

AI-Powered Moderation and Ad Management

When something is reported, an AI model reviews the content first and only escalates it to an admin when truly necessary – the final decision is always made by a human. Admins also handle businesses’ advertising requests, which appear in prominent places in the feed and on the map, accompanied by star ratings and text/photo reviews.

Final results

The strategy proved itself right at market entry: the 1,000-person Founding Member quota set for launch filled up within days, so we expanded it to 5,000.

Within four days of launch, more than 1,300 members had joined, and the community has kept growing ever since. At the beginning, most members came from Romania, Slovakia and the Netherlands, but members from the UK, Spain, Austria, Germany, Portugal, Australia and Switzerland joined as well, and even from the United States, Mexico, Belgium and Italy. Today, Hungarians are present on Hunvagy from 49+ different countries and use the platform more and more actively (and the number keeps growing day by day).

Already at launch, a ready, committed community of Founding Members was waiting for the app, ready to get exactly the location-based, “less algorithm, more proximity” experience that Hunvagy was originally built on.

A podcast was recently published in October 2026, where Mate talked about his life abroad, the story behind Hunvagy and how the platform was built with TRAVLRD.

Please note: the interview is in Hungarian. The Hunvagy part starts at 12:28: