A social media platform exclusively for the queer community

Nidhi* from Bhopal identifies as a lesbian. As a millennial from the queer community who learnt about gender and sexuality on her own—years before the online discourse on LGBTQIA+ rights surfaced— Nidhi couldn’t come out to her parents.

Eventually, after turning 30, she had to give in to the pressure from her family to get married to a man she knew since childhood. 

“I thought I could confide in my husband about my sexuality because we go back a long way. Instead, it made him extremely aggressive,” says Nidhi.  

Today, it has been about a year since Nidhi got divorced from what had turned into a terrifying, abusive marriage. And, for the first time in her life, she has friends, thanks to a new social media platform created exclusively for the queer community called Pride+. 

Pride+ is a labour of love from Aayush Agrawal, former entertainment professional-turned entrepreneur who runs Pranah Sandbox, a tech company that launched the app on February 20. 

“I saw that there was not a single space online where LGBTQIA+ persons - an entire population - could feel safe and enjoy the benefits of connection and knowledge that the heterosexual population accesses online,” Agrawal tells SocialStory. “The harassment and hate speech directed at the community was stifling; how could fellow human beings be treated this way?”

Two months since, the platform has garnered 753 users from 29 countries, with more than 400 users logged in on any given day. To Agrawal, this is as much a milestone for himself, as it is for the queer community.

As an ally and friend, he started working on Pride+ seven months ago, spending 12 hours a day learning everything from coding to developing and designing on his own, while continuing research with community members parallelly.

The current version of the app has six functioning verticals—Community, Jobs, Chat, Trings, Marketplace, and Meditation—and is available on Apple, Android, and Vision Pro. 

The ‘Community’ and ‘Chat’ features gave Nidhi, who has been battling severe depression, a space to open up about herself and her trauma for the first time to community members from across the globe. 

“I had never felt comfortable talking about my sexuality and gender identity to anyone in my hometown. I was also battling severe gender dysphoria for years, which isolates you,” she says. 

“Pride+ appeared on a WhatsApp forward and I signed up not knowing what to expect. But here, I saw others talking the same language as I did. Here, voicing myself out and being supported throughout gave me a sense of community, which is the opposite of isolation, and this is helping with my depression immensely,” she adds.

Features for mental health and therapy, education, career counselling, couples counselling, sexual wellness and dating are now underway at Pride+. Agrawal says having multiple requirements fulfilled under one roof is his way to ensure “there is ease of use and the community's needs are met integrally.”

Finding purpose in allyship

Having lost his father at a young age and watching his mother get ostracised from both his maternal and paternal sides, Agrawal was exposed to the patriarchal order and its impact on a single-mother family early on. 

Over the years that followed, he saw a friend from the film industry—a non-binary person—struggling to find gender fluid undergarments; met a transwoman who was refashioning sarees, but had few avenues to sell them; and a young gay man who was asked to leave his photography class owing to his gender identity. His tipping point came when the HR department of an entertainment platform he was working with, asked employees to refer ‘handicapped, female or LGBTQIA+ candidates’ and were promised a referral bonus. 

Agrawal's hunger for value and innovation strengthened when his mother was diagnosed with cervical cancer in 2019, and he poured all his savings into her treatment, until she emerged cancer-free by the end of that year. 

“I wanted to make a difference, and was willing to learn. Since I couldn’t afford to outsource work, I learned complex coding on my own and spent seven months developing several iterations, until the 124th one, that met the criteria for Apple, Android and Vision Pro, and was working perfectly,” says Agrawal.

He says the ‘Marketplace’ feature has helped small-time queer entrepreneurs share their work and find clientele. 

After years of painting glass bottles, Rajat*, a 29-year-old marketing professional from Gurugram, found the courage to share his artwork on Pride+ a month ago.      

“In no time three bottles were sold,” he says. “While I’d have to be wary of my sexuality, and like many others, create multiple profiles to find community members, here I could use my name and photograph freely, and just this sense of safety allowed me to share my work freely,” he says.

‘Trings’, the video feature on Pride+, is a space for members to share moments from their lives and express themselves creatively. 

Users can create or view job listings a on the platform, which  “eliminates bias and promotes jobs curated for LGBTQIA+ individuals based on merit and talent,” according to an FAQ page on the Pride+ app.

The platform is currently free. 

Over the course of this year, Agrawal plans to introduce certain paid plans on the app. These include educational courses, which will be provided by partner services.

“Since my intention is to build an entire ecosystem for the community with this application, these courses will be priced at less than affordable rates; so will be a host of services such as sessions with licenced therapists and lastly premium plans for dating that will require minimal subscription fee,” says Agrawal.

He adds, “apart from a-la-carté, users will be able to avail all paid services at a discounted cost with just one premium plan as well.”

Pride+ will also have an enterprise version. Its ’B2B offering, which will essentially comprise services directly to businesses —jobs, consultancy, partnerships with content media, educational institutes, and so on.  “For example, if an institution has a gender studies course, we can offer, say, six sessions with our experts from the community, to provide in-person classes to the students of that institution or, we can be a brand partner for any LGBTQIA+ content release and so on,” says Agrawal.

“A lot of the revenue we generate from our corporate partnerships will go into offering subsidised plans for our users,” he adds.

Safety-an important paradigm 

The platform uses artificial intelligence to efficiently run the app and to keep its users safe.

“Pride+ leverages AI as a tool for three major aspects: for maintenance—to monitor instances of the app freezing or shutting down, evaluate bot activity; storage sense—to reduce storage clutter and trash files; and most importantly, for customer support moderation and verification.”

“While there is no app in the world to ensure that only people of a certain community are able to join, our privacy and safety policy is such that a post or profile will be removed in less than six hours of it being reported. I have ensured this personally, since I’m the one working the backend,” says Agrawal. 

(*Names have been changed to protect identities)