Product Management
2026
Inspiring spontaneous connections in busy routines
I pitched, tested, and led a team to develop a service that integrates social interaction into students' busy schedules
Overview
GoTgt is a social app that transforms the act of initiating a plan into a simple and passive signal
This project was for a startup class where we competed our service ideas against another 20 students. The focus of the progression for this project was in the ideation, research, business value, and user experience. I later went in and completed the design of the app.
The Impact
The project culminated in a mock investor pitch, and GoTgt received the second-highest funding allocation in the class.
Problem
How to compete against 20 other ideas?
But really, what makes a winning service? I knew it had to be a problem that was real and relevant, a product that would generate value for the business and the user, and an execution that is actually useable.
Real & Relevant Problem
The problem space should strike a cord with both me and the investors
Generate Value
The product must add real value to the user and the business
Useable Execution
The final product must actually be frictionless enough for the users to reach for and use it
Considering these factors, I settled on focusing on student mental health and the existing "social media" landscape. I wanted to challenge what it means to make a social app and if a digital service could possibly improve real-life connection. Thus, the problem statement I landed at was:
How could I integrate meaningful connection into young people's (20s-30s) daily routine while meeting them where they're at?
I pitched this problem and a rough solution to the class and was selected to move to the next round with only three other ideas! I was assigned a team of 3 other designers for the second half of the project.
Research
Who is struggling, why, and what already exists?
I knew that young people are struggling with their mental health because I saw it all around me. My friends and peers, even myself, get overwhelmed with the work from their daily routines and hop on social media for an easy break. But beyond my personal experience, what does the research say?
40% of U.S. adults reported experiencing loneliness in 2025, up from 35% in both 2010 and 2018. Young adults report some of the highest rates.
This prevcieved lonliness exists and spiked after 2018, just about when social meida platforms were really taking off. Young people, who also use social media more, are also the ones who are being affected even more.
We also researched through firsthand interviews of our target users:
"I actually would want to add more socialization into my routine, but I don't because I don't know who to ask and if it will end up being a waste of time."
Carnegie Mellon University Student
20 years old
Where we landed
Through the secondary research and interviews, we learned that young people isolation and loneliness is a huge, almost overwhelming problem. And it's not really by choice that students don't reach out and spend more time with their friends, it's more that they can't afford the risk that the time spent thinking of something to do and coordinating the hangout will be paid off.
From here, we knew our service had to be one that could make the plans extremely easy to initiate, pull from existing schedule activities, and easily resectable without much social cost.
MVP
Testing our idea
Our hypothesis was this:
If the barriers to initiating a spontaneous hangout is lowered, would college students with established routines be willing to engage in more in-person interaction with their friends?
Our service idea was shaping up to be an app that would make planning hangouts so frictionless and integrated into a person's routine that the user would have little reason to not see their friends. It was an idea that excited us all, as we as college students thought that it was a solution that we could genuinely see using.
So we tested it on ourselves:
Each of us selected a handful of friends and spent a week sending spontaneous invitations, mimicking the features of the app. We wanted to see if our friends would be more likely to hang out if the activities were spontaneous and integrated into our routines.
During the testing each of us actaully got to hang out more with our friends which was really neat
Where we landed
The results were clear: nearly every one-on-one invitation resulted in an actual hangout. Routine activities that would have happened alone became shared ones simply because someone signaled they were open.
But the experiment also revealed something the design needed to solve. Group invitations sent to open chats got no responses as the diffusion of responsibility was too high. Several participants also noted they didn't know when to give up waiting. These two findings directly shaped the claim window and the private circle model in the final design.
What is the Business Value?
We did not forget about this. As our pitch was to mock investors, we knew this had to actually be able to make money. There were two streams of revenue that we looked into:
Institutions
For universities and workplaces that already invest in wellness, retention, and community-building programs, GoTgt can be licensed as a wellness tool.
Local Businesses
GoTgt could partner with gyms, cafés, and other local businesses that benefit from increased group participation. Our idea was that businesses can list exclusive promotions that require users to bring their friends in order to claim the deal.
My team members and I reached out to campus faculty and local businesses like gyms and cafes to interview them about whether they would be interested to invest in and how they could be integrated into the service.
Development
Pulling it all together
The final product is GoTgt, a service built around this reframe: what if coordination didn't require anyone to ask? Instead of asking friends to join you, you simply share what you're already doing and let them opt in.
It works by having users create friend circles based on routine activities, such as something as simple as lunch, and post time-sensitive invites. Friends who are in the activity circle get a notification and can choose to join or ignore it.
Routine activities
The circles are based on activites that people already do in their day-to-day lives, so hanging out doesn't become an additional chore but rather a more social way to do what they were already planning on doing
Closed circles
The people in the activitiy circles are invited and personal friends of the creator. We found that making this a friend-discovery service simply goes against the useability of it as it creates another uneeded layer of friction
The claim window
The invites are time-based so both parties know how much time they have to decide/wait, removing a layer of ambiguity
The Pitch
Everything built up to the final pitch to the investors.
The moment we had all been waiting for… (we all believed we had such a strong idea it was for sure 1st place)… and we tied for second. The feedback was that while the service idea is strong and well tested, the investors, all middle-aged professionals, could not fully see the appeal for the service. They thought there wasn't enough proof that the users would truly reach for the product for them to invest so much of their money in.
Reflections (+ Final Designs)
Leading the project showed me what ownership looks like from ideation to working with the team
From this project, I learned not just what it was like to feel deeply passionate about an idea, but also how to properly share it in various contexts. How to explain it concisely to peers and advisors, how to share it with collaborators to work on together, and how to pitch it to investors to buy into. As we did not win like we thought we would, there is obviously still room for me to improve on how to better understand the audience I am pitching to. Regardless, I am very proud of this project and so grateful to the team that I worked with for believing in the idea in the first place.
Design
After the project, I decided to go in and design out what the app would look like. We had a user flow and very low fi screens, but I was interested in prototyping it out to see where I could take it. Here are the final designs:
