Hoop is an application that connects with Snapchat to allow users to meet strangers and make new connections.

In the first-ever interview about Hoop, Dazz’s 26-year-old co-founders Lucas Gervais and Alexi Pourret reveal that the idea came from watching user patterns in their previous experiment on the Snap Kit platform.

They built an app called Dazz in 2018 that let users create polls and get anonymous answers from friends, but they noticed their 250,000 users "always ended up adding each other on Snap".

So they decided to create Hoop, the app to make new Snap friends.^[2]

Gervais and Pourret have been friends since age two, growing up in small town in France. They met their two developers in high school, and are now marketing students at university. With Hoop, they say the goal was to “meet everyone’s needs, from connecting people from different cultures to helping lonely people to feel better to simply growing your Snapchat community.”^[2]

Hoop for iOS or Android resembles Tinder. A user creates an account with some photos and bio information, and starts swiping through profiles. If they like someone, they tap a Snapchat button to request their Snap username so they can message them. Hoop limits your asks by making a user spend its in-app “diamonds” currency to reach out. After about 10 requests to chat, a user will have to earn more diamonds. They do that by sharing and getting friends to open their invite link to the app, adding people on Snapchat that they meet on Hoop, logging in each day, taking a survey, watching a video ad and completing offers by signing up for streaming services or car insurance providers. It also trades diamonds for rating Hoop in the App Store. ^[2][5]

Hoop climbed as high as No. 2 on the overall iOS chart and No.

#1 on the Social Apps chart on January 24, 2020.

As of February 2020, it is at No. 83 overall and No. 7 in social, putting it above apps like Discord, Linkedin, Skype and new Vine successor Byte. Hoop had more than 3 million installs as of early 2020.^[2]