A social network for nature where clout came from donating to conservation.
Instagram doesn’t care about your beetle photo. NatureReel did.
2018–2024 • No longer online
Where it came from
I started a Discord server called Discover Earth for people who photograph nature. It grew organically to 2,500+ members and is still running today. People shared their macro shots, their bird sightings, their underwater footage. They could post on Instagram too, and many did, but they kept coming back to Discover Earth because it was a room full of people who actually cared about their beetle photo.
I leaned into that and built a dedicated app. Discord is fundamentally a chat room. Someone posts a photo and a few hours later it’s buried under new messages. NatureReel would let that content persist. A TikTok-style feed where you scroll through the wonders of the natural world, full screen, one at a time.
“I saw something sacred and I want someone else to see it too.”
What you could do
Tag the species in your photo. See every photo taken in a particular place. Earn badges for spotting different types of species. Read facts about the animal you just photographed. And then donate to the NGO that conserves that species, and earn clout on the platform for doing it.
On most social platforms, status comes from going viral. On NatureReel it came from putting money behind the cause the whole community obviously cared about.
Where it went
Applied to Taronga Zoo’s HATCH conservation-tech accelerator in 2024 and 2025. Member of the UTS Startups Growth Funding Program. Every environmental NGO approached signed on as a partner.
What happened
Built on Bubble, launched, ran for a year. People signed up and shared photos. The platform didn’t scale — but the community did.
The Discord photographers already had everything they needed: audience, real-time reactions, the feeling that someone was on the other side. A photo dropped into Discord got emoji and comments within minutes. NatureReel couldn’t compete with that until it had its own critical mass, and a cold-start social network is the hardest problem in tech.
The lesson: come for the tool, stay for the network. Solve a one-player game first. I took that into everything I built next.
What it led to
I kept building nature software. Next came Salt Safari, a citizen-science species guide for ocean swimmers. The Discover Earth community is still going.
The thing NatureReel made obvious: you can’t move a community by building a better app. The community is the product.
From the feed
Photos uploaded by NatureReel users.