We made meeting new people safer and less awkward.

Young professionals relocating to a new city struggle to build a social network, and most existing products feel algorithmic or dating-adjacent. We built a 0→1 prototype our client could pitch to investors, grounded in what users actually told us about meeting strangers online.

We ran a Google Forms survey and received 70 responses. Most respondents had already tried non-romantic networking products, most were passively networking, and nearly everyone preferred meeting people with a shared interest over meeting complete strangers. We synthesized the findings in an affinity diagram, distilling everything into three principles.

We opened with a crazy-eights exercise to generate quick ideas, but nothing jumped out. We didn't want to build another 'meet new friends' app or another LinkedIn. After long discussions we landed on an events-first model: any user can create an event around any topic. An English-speaking expat in Berlin who needs to complete a German registration could team up with others in the same position, skipping the small talk and growing a network casually around a shared task.

A user starts on her feed, drills into an event, views the creator's profile, joins, gains access to the event-specific chatroom, and eventually creates her own event (description, location, time) before returning to her feed. We limited the prototype to only the essential features, enough to tell the story in a pitch.

With the flow locked we sketched lo- to mid-fi wireframes, iterating quickly between design and testing. We added two screens along the way: a user profile, and a calendar where users can see every event they've joined. A few rounds of fine-tuning later we had a final design the client was ready to bring to investors.