Oleg Shitsel Built Bambkuss Active for People Who Would Rather Go Find Their Crowd

Oleg Shitsel once spent three years studying at night for a promotion that never came. That experience shaped how he thinks about social media, and it’s a big part of why Bambkuss Active, the interest-based network he co-founded in Germany, asks its users to go find people instead of waiting for a feed to serve them up.

Shitsel was born in 1987 in Khmelnytskyi, Ukraine, and his family moved to Germany in 1994, when he was 7. He struggled in school at first, mostly because he didn’t speak German yet. He learned it, then started on English. As a teenager he was far more interested in soccer and table tennis than anything happening online, though like most students at the time he had a profile on StudiVZ, the German network that was everywhere in the late 2000s. At 20 he took a job at a car manufacturer in Bremen, mainly because he wanted to earn his own money.

He also wanted a career there. Alongside his regular job, Shitsel studied for about three years and became a State Certified Engineer, assuming the qualification would move him up. It didn’t, and he never got the opportunity he’d been working toward.

The idea for Bambkuss started almost by accident. In 2019 a friend told him he’d paid someone to build a dating platform. Shitsel thought he was joking until he saw the half-finished homepage. He asked to get involved. Then COVID-19 arrived, his employer closed, and he was home for weeks. Shortly after, his friend told him the programmer had become seriously ill and couldn’t continue. The project was finished before it launched.

Shitsel didn’t want to drop it. He figured the world didn’t need another dating site, but a network built around hobbies and shared activities was a different story. He wasn’t confident he could actually build one. He has said the concept came to him while lying in bed with his eyes closed, and he sketched the layout on paper afterward. Around then, a schoolmate he hadn’t seen in years got back in touch, also frustrated with his job. When the friend came to Shitsel’s birthday party and saw the drawings, he wanted in. He knew graphic design, which the project badly needed. The team learned the rest as they went, converting the sketches into digital graphics and a working simulation that eventually became the template for the code. Shitsel leads the company as Founder and CEO, alongside Co-Founder Maksim “Shonn” Khazanov, and the platform was developed in Bremen.

The site works off a simple motto. When members see a hobby or activity on someone’s profile, they can respond with “I do the same!”, “I would like to do the same!” or “I would not do the same!” Registration and chat cost nothing. To send requests or messages, users need at least one photo on their profile, and that’s the only requirement. Uploads are limited to photos for now. Paid premium features are planned but haven’t been released, and members can delete their profiles permanently at any time.

What started as drawings in a Bremen apartment has since expanded well beyond Germany, and that growth is the company’s biggest move so far. Khazanov has said Bambkuss Active was built to “reignite real human engagement around what people love doing,” giving users a free place to share photos and find common ground. A mobile app is in development, and Shitsel has mentioned a video platform as a possible next step.

It’s a fitting product for someone whose career only took off once he stopped waiting for a company to make room for him. Bambkuss puts the same choice in front of its users, and anyone who wants to start searching can sign up at Bambkuss.com.