Inside HUE: The New App Helping People Of Color Find Love And Connection
Dating in 2025 is tough, and it’s even harder if you’re hoping to meet someone who shares your cultural background. The same can be said for building friendships and finding community. While social media offers endless possibilities, it’s rarely easy to filter for genuine connection. And on dating apps, your options are limited. Currently, the only mainstream apps that allow users to filter by ethnicity are Hinge, Bumble (in the US and Canada), and OkCupid.
This is where HUE comes in. It’s an app designed to help people of color meet, date, and build friendships with others from similar backgrounds. POCIT spoke with founder Dayo Abeeb about launching HUE, the challenges people of color face on mainstream apps, and what’s next for the platform.
Building HUE
After graduating from Princeton with a degree in Politics in 2022, Abeeb noticed a recurring theme in conversations with friends. “A few of my Nigerian friends would say they want to date Nigerians, but it was hard to build that community,” he said. “So I thought, why not don’t I build something to help remedy this. So I built HUE.”
HUE is a dating and friendship app that allows users to specify your ethnicity and the ethnicity of the person you want to meet. The app currently has over 70 ethnicities across different communities. “So if you’re a Nigerian looking for Africans, you can say that. If you’re a Congolese looking for other Congolese, you can say that.”
The app currently features two modules: Hue Dating, focused on romantic connections, and Hue Community, a social networking side that supports group chats and friendships.
“We launched in early September, and we’re already at 3000 users. Most of them are in New York,” Ayeeb said. ” We’re growing. We’re expanding, and I think people really resonate with the story.”
Why People of Color Struggle on Dating Apps
It’s no secret that people of color, especially Black women, don’t have the easiest time on dating apps. Black women’s profiles receive approximately 7.7% fewer matches and 5.5% fewer conversations on average, according to a 2023 study.
Apryl Williams, PhD, author of Not My Type: Automating Sexual Racism in Online Dating, told ESSENCE that app algorithms often reinforce racial preferences by showing users more people who look like them, which can make it harder for Black women to find authentic connections.
Abeeb echoes this, stating, “I think, to be quite candid, I think the current apps really aren’t built for people of color. I think that’s just the current reality of dating apps.” This was his reason for building HUE: “I think I just wanted to create a space that was more inclusive.”
Feedback and future growth
So far, user feedback has been overwhelmingly positive, Abeeb says. “They (users) feel like they haven’t had a space for them, and they feel like they’re finally being seen, which is really nice.”
That hasn’t meant everything has gone smoothly. Early users pointed out that the app’s initial list of ethnicities underrepresented certain African countries. “If you go into my TikTok and you go to the comments, you’ll see some angry comments, you’ll see some angry comments like, Why don’t you have this country?” HUE added more countries to the app in a recent update.
HUE hasn’t raised funding yet, but Adeeb is looking to launch a pre-seed round soon. “We had interest before, but I kind of want just to make sure that we got the product market fit, we got feedback, and we were creating an app that people actually wanted.”
Image: Adedayo Abeeb
