Couchers is officially out of Beta

Quick summary: we are out of Beta and into version 1, we're releasing a new strategy around safe & active community instead of bashing our competitors, a fancy redesigned landing page, and a bunch of new features to make core couch surfing functionality better! Share the platform with your friends and let's grow the community together!

We are super excited to share that Couchers is today finally out of the Beta phase with our version 1 (v1) launch. After five years of building and developing the platform and community―first through the Alpha stage and a very long Beta stage―we are finally ready for our big launch! This means a brand new strategy, a spiffy new landing page, and a bunch of new features.

Today we are launching our new strategy centered around a commitment on being the safest, healthiest, and most active couch surfing community. This is an evolution of our original plan, but adapted for the next stage of the community, where we clearly define what we stand for instead of living the shadow of another platform.

In addition, we are launching a brand new landing page to more clearly communicate our values and what sets us apart, and to explain what our community is all about to newbies and veteran couch surfers alike.

Finally, we have combined a number of exciting new features into this release. These have been gradually rolled out over the past few months to make sure they are ready for you today (and hopefully mostly free of bugs)! Read on to find out what these are.

What does the v1 launch mean?

Although the platform has been usable for a long time, until now, even some of the core functionality has been somewhat buggy and not as polished as we would like, in order to call it "complete". The v1 launch signals the completion of the platform in the sense that core functionality has been cleaned up and we believe it is fully ready for all to use! A lot of this cleanup effort was also done in the v0.9.9 release a few months ago.

This launch means we can now focus on growing the platform and coming up with new features that set us apart and help you connect with other members better.

New Features in v1

The features we decided to work on for v1 were picked to best further our goal of being a safe and active community, as well as tighten up the core functionality of the platform to make the experience super smooth and easy.

Redesigned Landing Page

We are really excited about our new landing page, which clearly communicates what Couchers is, what we stand for, and what you can find on the platform once you sign up. We hope this will help us gain more of the right kinds of members!

A huge thanks to Nicole who built the majority of the landing page; Pablo and Aapeli who also helped build it; Marta and Charlotte who designed it; Jesse and Chris who helped test it; and countless others who helped write or brainstorm our marketing message, or provided their input in other ways!

The new landing page features an anonymized map layer: pins are randomized to be at a random point 2-10 km (1.2-6.2 mi) away from their true location and are not tied to any user info. The map is further restricted to not zoom very far in.

References

We completely overhauled functionality for leaving a reference with two key updates:

• you can now indicate whether you did not stay with or host someone (and we won't remind you to leave references); and

• you can now send our Safety Team private feedback (that's not shown on the public reference) about your interactions through the reference flow. You can use this functionality to let us know if something felt off, even if there's no cause for bigger concern. More information is always better and helps the Safety Team understand situations better and keep the platform safe!

Thanks to Aapeli, Nicole, and Jason for these updates. Nicole also added the number of references to the references tab on profiles to draw more attention to it.

Find members faster: a new and redesigned map

Nicole spent months re-architecting and rebuilding a brand new Map Search page! The old one was creaking with age and very difficult to update and add features to. Nicole rewrote it from scratch! Aapeli helped build some new backend functionality to significantly speed up searching, and Jesse among many others helped test it!

We put a lot of thought into making the map as usable as possible, trying to think about what should be shown, what should be hidden, and how to best display all this data. We hope you find it useful!

Don't miss out on news: new notification feed

We've been working on notifications for quite a few releases now. In this release we introduced a notification feed, rolled out push notifications for desktop and mobile, as well as added a bunch of new notification types for things like nested replies on discussions, and pending host requests.

Don't want so many notifications? No problem. Each notification type can be adjusted for a particular item or for a whole class of notifications. Find this under Notification Settings (accessible from Account Settings). We hope this helps members see what they care about, without having to waste time searching the platform; a core value of not maximizing empty engagement.

Thanks to Aapeli, Rafael and Yannic for the backend implementation; Nicole for some frontend work; and Jesse and others for testing.

Speaking your language: a new language selector & translations

We implemented a language selector and are in the active process of translating the platform to languages other than English! Thanks to Laura, Nicole and Aapeli for their work on the functionality, as well as the many folks helping out on translation!

If you'd like to see the platform be translated to your own language, please apply to volunteer for our Translator Position! You can contribute as much or as little as you want. Every bit helps!

Safety & Moderation

We have rolled out significant new functionality to make the platform safer:

• Nicole and Aapeli implemented functionality to remove friends;
• Nicole built the frontend functionality to block (and unblock) users, while Yannic helped fix up some lingering backend functionality for that;
• Colleen added report flags to event cards; and
• under the hood, Aapeli, Jesse and Rafael continue to work on many different moderation and admin features to help combat abuse and make the platform safer for everyone!

We also updated our policies and now forbid nudism and shared sleeping surfaces (such as a shared bed). The change was prompted by the significant moderation burden caused by regular issues with this subgroup of the community. This was a decision made by the Board in order to promote safety on the platform and to set clear expectations for everyone. Thanks to the volunteers who spearheaded this difficult change!

Public roadmap

While we actively work on many features and improvements to the platform, we aren't always great at making those changes easy to see and notice. Sometimes people even criticize us for not making enough progress.

To help communicate what we are doing and when, Chris has spearheaded an effort to produce and maintain a public roadmap. This is a great resource to learn about what we're working on and what to look forward to!

Activeness probes

Aapeli with assistance from Nicole, built out an activeness probe system: if you have set your status to hosting but haven't logged in in many months, we will occasionally send you a notification to ask if you are still interested in hosting.

This helps us get a better idea of whether you would respond to a prospective surfer coming into town. In the next few weeks we'll be gradually rolling out this new functionality. We hope it helps reduce the number of well-thought out requests sent by surfers to hosts that never read their notification in the first place.

Our new CouchOps team

In order to execute on our new strategy and marketing plans including this huge launch, we assembled a new team that we call CouchOps. This new team is in charge of marketing & branding (incl. social media, the blog, landing pages), safety & support (moderation, policies, verification, etc), community building (community creation, engagement, feedback, etc), volunteer recruitment and general operations within Couchers. They did a phenomenal job brainstorming, writing, planning, coordinating, and executing this launch.

That team currently consists of (in alphabetical order) Aapeli, Bruna, Charlotte, Chris, Colleen, Jesse, Marta, Mindy, and Nicole.

Our Engineering and Product team

Our engineers, UI/UX designers and other software-focused volunteers continue to work hard on our Engineering and Product team.

This year we've had the following wonderful people in our meetings planning and working on the platform: Aapeli, Nicole, Chris, Jesse, Colleen, Laura, Pablo, Shirley, Rafael, Yannic, Krishna, Caroline, Gracee, Kelvin, Lee, Alena, Andrei, Gabx, Kiki, Navi, Shane, Chalen, David, Ivan, Jacob, James, Justyna, Kirti and Rishi.

Our rehauled branding & marketing strategy

Our new strategy is centered around a commitment to being the safest, healthiest, and most active couch surfing community.

From our founding, we have always been defined by our competition: being the non-profit and open-source alternative to CouchSurfing.com™ that takes our community seriously and is here to fix the structural problems with other platforms. This has been an incredibly effective strategy, and it has helped us seed the community with the right crowd: a lot of veteran couch surfers with the couch surfing spirit.

As our community continues to grow and mature, it's time to stop living in the shadow of another platform and start living up to our own identity and values. This is something the volunteer team and Board have been thinking about a lot, and this has steered our priorities since the start of the year. When you look back at our original plan, it's clear that everything we identified as the issues then were different aspects of community health and safety.

In the coming months we are going to work on updating our messaging across the board and further building out our public landing pages to help new users learn about the platform and community.

Coming up next

Over the next weeks the volunteer teams and Board will be working together to define our concrete priorities and roadmap for the rest of the year. We have brainstormed many ideas and have a rough path forward, but will work on refining it further. We will certainly concentrate a large part of our efforts on building a native mobile app, as well as allocating engineering resources to help our CouchOps team with their marketing and social media efforts.

We have plans to build infrastructure to better measure the impact of what we do, taking a more metric-driven approach to features. The community is still at a size where it's hard to make strong statements about the impact of individual changes, but we believe that getting better visibility into what the experience is like for users is key.

Thank you!

Couchers.org is only possible due to our amazing and dedicated volunteer team. We're so appreciate of our volunteers who believe in the vision of a non-profit, open-source, safe and active couch surfing community and donate their free time to make it a reality.

To everyone mentioned in this post, to all our past volunteers who got us where we are today, and to all our future volunteers to come―thank you!

Finally we also want to thank everyone in our community for sticking with us through many years of hard work to get to this point!

Help grow our community

Want to help Couchers be even more amazing?!

Volunteer

Want to hang with other motivated travelers and help our community thrive? We can always use more help!

Specifically we could really use help with:

• Translating Couchers into other languages
• Help from mid-level and senior software engineers (who have 5+ hours per week to spare: frontend/backend)
• Mid-level and senior engineers with React Native experience
• Writing blog posts and content around couch surfing (we could really use help to do this more regularly)
• Creating regular content, graphics and posts on Instagram
• Coming up with a TikTok content strategy and getting us going on TikTok
• Community Builders who want to help build the Couchers community in their own city or country

Apply via the links above or write us at [email protected] with how you'd like to help out!

Hype us up on social media

Follow us on the socials, and like+share religiously 🙏

Donate

We have set a fundraising goal of raising $5000 this year. Help us reach this goal and keep the servers running by donating to our non-profit. You'll also get a fun badge!

Written by Aapeli. Published on 2025/07/01