Croatian entrepreneur builds platform connecting hobbyists across Croatia

A Croatian entrepreneur has created an online platform designed around an increasingly offline idea: bringing people together through the things they enjoy doing.

Hobinjak.eu, founded by Hrvoje Ljubešić, is a Croatian-language platform that brings hobby communities, local events, second-hand equipment, shops and personal collections together in one place.

Rather than starting with a profile and a general social feed, users begin by choosing their hobbies and location.

The platform currently covers 136 hobbies, from hiking, cycling and board games to cosplay, metal detecting, Pokémon cards, video games, cinema and theatre.

As of 1 September, Hobinjak had 1,263 registered members, with 971 having joined at least one hobby community.

Ljubešić says the idea came without a business plan.

“There was no business plan,” he says. “My best man is a serious hobbyist, he does cosplay, plays board games, collects Pokémon cards , and the idea came to me literally while I was on the phone with him.”

He was speaking to his friend as he prepared for Krakon and discussed Pokémon cards when Ljubešić began thinking about the lack of a single platform built specifically for hobbyists.

“I had never once heard of a platform made for hobbyists,” he says.

For Ljubešić, the problem was not necessarily a lack of information. It was where that information could be found.

“I realised the information is not missing. It is scattered,” he says.

Hobby-related information is often spread across Facebook groups, forums, Instagram accounts and specialist websites, meaning people can have to search several different platforms to discover what is happening in their own area.

“The problem is that people are flooded with it,” he says. “They have to check five different platforms to find out what is happening in their own town, and in the end they simply give up.”

His idea was straightforward.

“I wanted one place where looking it up is enough.”

The name itself comes from a simple Croatian wordplay.

“In Croatian, a ‘ribnjak’ is where the fish are and a ‘šljivik’ is where the plums are. So a ‘Hobinjak’ is where the hobbyists gather,” Ljubešić explains.

“That was the entire thought process.”

Once registered, users select their hobbies and the town where they live. Content is then filtered according to those choices.

The Moj kutak section gives each hobby its own community and forum, allowing members to share photographs, ask questions and show what they have made or collected.

Users see the hobbies they have joined rather than one general-purpose timeline.

The platform also has an events section, where organisers can publish meet-ups, competitions and workshops. Events can include registration, capacity limits and waiting lists, while users can filter them by town or county.

Anyone can post an event and there is no charge.

One of the features Ljubešić highlights most is Otkrij događaje, which allows users to browse upcoming activities using a card-style interface.

Events can be swiped through in a similar way to dating apps, right if something looks interesting, left to skip it.

For Ljubešić, the idea is to make discovering activities quick.

“It turns ‘I have nothing on this weekend’ into something you can solve in thirty seconds,” he says.

There is also a marketplace for second-hand hobby equipment.

Users can advertise items within the relevant hobby community, but Hobinjak does not process payments or take a commission. Buyers and sellers contact each other directly.

A directory of Croatian shops and craftspeople connected with individual hobbies is designed to help newcomers find local suppliers.

The platform also includes Collections, where users can display what they own, have built or use for their hobby. Collections can remain private unless the user chooses to make them visible.

Built in Croatian

Hobinjak is deliberately entirely in Croatian.

Every hobby, button and listing is presented in the language.

“That is a deliberate choice,” Ljubešić says.

The focus is on helping people in particular Croatian towns find others nearby who share their interests.

“Somebody looking for a hiking partner near Karlovac is not going to write that request in English,” he says.

The platform is therefore primarily intended as a Croatian community project, although people living in Croatia who are learning the language can also use it.

The platform’s early growth has exceeded the target Ljubešić had originally set for himself.

“When I started, I told myself that passing a thousand registered users in the first year would be a real success,” he says.

Three months after launching, Hobinjak had passed that figure.

The number of hobby communities has also increased from 103 to 136, largely through suggestions from users.

Of those 136 communities, 99 have at least five members.

Hiking is currently the largest community, with 312 members, followed by board games with 129, cycling with 112, video games with 107, cinema and theatre with 93, and pub quizzes with 80.

The platform has recorded 90 events, of which 56 had already taken place and 34 were still upcoming as of 1 September.

Its shop directory lists 1,472 shops across 215 towns, while the marketplace had 50 listings, with six already sold.

Hobinjak now covers all 21 Croatian counties and 898 towns and cities.

Membership growth has also accelerated, with 171 registrations in June, 454 in July and 635 in August.

The service remains free and carries no advertising.

Ljubešić says the most difficult part of creating Hobinjak was not building the technology.

“The difficult bit is reaching the audience for each individual hobby, one hobby at a time,” he says.

He describes one of the biggest challenges as the experience of a new visitor who finds their hobby community but discovers that nobody has joined yet.

“The worst moment is when somebody arrives, finds their hobby, and sees that it was founded last week and is empty.”

That has made building individual communities a major part of his work.

He contacts event organisers, creates promotional material for events and promotes them through social media. He also asks permission to post in existing communities and forums.

“I think of it as a fair trade: they get an audience, the site gets an event worth showing up to,” he says.

There is no company or development team behind Hobinjak.

Ljubešić built the platform himself while working full-time and raising a family.

“I have a full-time job, a wife and three children, and I built Hobinjak in the evenings that I used to spend on my own hobby – video games,” he says.

He says putting together a development team was not an option and that he used AI tools to help accelerate the process.

“Having a clear plan and a clear vision mattered more than anything technical,” he says.

At this stage, server costs are the platform’s main financial expense.

The project is otherwise being funded through Ljubešić’s own time and resources.

From screen time to real-world connections

The longer-term idea behind Hobinjak is to use the internet to encourage people to spend more time doing things together offline.

“A great deal of our free time now disappears into scrolling,” Ljubešić says.

“I would rather the screen be the place where you meet people than the place where you stay alone.”

That could mean discovering a hiking group, finding people for a board-game night, joining an acting workshop or simply turning up to a local pub quiz.

For Ljubešić, the purpose of the platform ultimately comes back to community.

“If I had to finish the sentence ‘Hobinjak is a place where people…’, it would be ‘…find their community, one where they feel safe, and where they can grow alongside their people.’”

And he sees the platform itself as something that should develop alongside its users.

Anyone can suggest a hobby that is missing, while suggestions for improvements can influence what is added to the site.

“Whoever signs up today is not just joining a website, they are shaping what it turns into,” Ljubešić says.

Hobinjak is available online for free, with users able to browse its hobby communities and events without paying a subscription or seeing advertising.

You can check out the platform here: Hobinjak.eu

All 136 hobbies: hobinjak.eu/hobbies

What is on near you: hobinjak.eu/events