Anyone who’s tried to make a friend online knows the problem. You get past “hey,” and then nobody knows what to say next. Bambkuss.com, a social platform built in Bremen, Germany, tries to solve that by asking a simpler question first. When you look at someone’s hobbies, you answer with one of three options: “I do the same,” “I would like to do the same,” or “I would not do the same.”
That motto drives the whole platform. Members build profiles around their hobbies, activities and interests, add photos, search for people with overlapping interests, and send a request when something clicks. A shared hobby gives two people an obvious first topic. “I would like to” gives the other person a reason to reach out. Even “I would not” has its place, since it’s an honest answer. Signing up and chatting are free. The only rule for sending requests or messages is that your profile needs at least one photo. The site supports photos only, not video, and anyone who wants to leave can have their profile deleted right away and for good. Premium features are planned but haven’t launched yet. In September 2026, the company announced its national rollout in the United States.
Founder and CEO Oleg Shitsel spent years in the auto industry before any of this. He was born in 1987 in Khmelnytskyi, Ukraine, and moved to Germany with his family in 1994, when he was seven. School was hard at first while he learned German. At 20, he started working at a car manufacturing company in Bremen, and over roughly three years of studying on the side, he became a state-certified engineer. The career chance he’d been working toward never came.
The idea for Bambkuss came out of a project that fell apart. In 2019, a friend told him he’d commissioned a dating platform, and Shitsel wanted to be part of it. Then the pandemic hit in 2020. His employer had to close, and the programmer on the friend’s project became seriously ill and couldn’t continue. Shitsel didn’t want to drop it. Dating sites were already everywhere, so he set out to build a social network instead, though he admits he wasn’t sure he could actually do it. He worked out the first version in his head while lying in bed with his eyes closed, then sketched the whole thing on paper.
Then an old school friend he’d lost touch with came to visit. He was unhappy at his job too, and when he saw the sketches at Shitsel’s birthday party, he wanted in. He also knew his way around graphic design. The team, including co-founder Maksim Khazanov, has known each other since school. Together they turned those drawings into computer graphics, then a full graphic design, then a simulation that served as the template for the programming. They had to teach themselves along the way, learning by doing. Shitsel says the beginning was especially difficult, but each success was fun enough to keep them going.
Khazanov has said the platform was built to reignite real human engagement around what people love doing. Shitsel’s message is about how it got made. If you use your intellect, your strengths and your experience to go after something you think is impossible, and you have a small, motivated team around you, he believes that “impossible” thing can become reality. Right now the team is focused on the desktop and mobile versions and on marketing, with a video platform mentioned as a possible next project.
For a site built on giving an honest answer up front, the founder’s own story starts with one. When he set out to build a social network, Shitsel wasn’t sure he could pull it off. He tried anyway. Anyone who wants to see how the three-choice setup works can create a free profile at Bambkuss.
