Amitue

Motivation

"Social media today is too much about media, and not enough about social" - This was the mission statement I set out to fix with Amitue. I find I always enjoy having coffee chats with people, and whenever I ask friends (or even strangers!) if they enjoy face to face meetings, I always get an unequivocal "yes!". So, I wanted to work on a tool that would help streamline the process, and make it easier to have genuine human interactions.

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Inspiration

I've been on the Waterloo Student Venture Fund for several semesters, and having an opportunity to chat with people on the fund is always a pleasure, as everyone has such different experiences. In one of the semesters that I was there, the team would organize weekly coffee chats by matching together everyone on the fund into pairs. Usually this worked out great, but sometimes finding a time that would work for both people was hard, and the coffee chats ended up getting cancelled.

The Amitue App

I started working on an app shortly after that semester, because I thought that it would be useful enough to warrant being a standalone app, and that it might also be interesting for people outside the fund too. The app would look at each meeting participant's calendar, and automatically schedule coffee chats in slots that worked for everyone. Naturally, due to only working on it in my spare time, progress was oftentimes very slow, as it was a lower priority.

While I saw a lot of value in it, I had a hard time getting users on the platform. At the same time, one of my personal goals - and a big reason why I chose to study at Waterloo - is that I wanted to work on my own startup, and in early 2020, I had the opportunity to do exactly that by doing an eco-op.

ECo-op

By the time I had applied to join the eco-op program around October 2019 I had already put together an app for iOS and Android, so I was expecting to focus on adding features and growing users. However, after doing a month of user research surveys and discussions, I reached a point where the feedback I was getting became very consistent: "I'd use it if all my friends were using it".

So, around the start of February, I decided to change my approach. Rather than focus on the app as the primary product, I'd instead work on a scheduling backend, with integrations to multiple services. If a user signed up for one, they'd automatically have an account and be able to use any of the others! The first such service I put together is the group meetings scheduler which finds overlaps in participants' availabilities. As I'd hoped, this started having a bit more traction than the app, but I was never able to convert users from one app to the other.

By mid-March, the COVID-19 situation had evolved to quarantines, and it seemed appropriate to re-evaluate the project. I decided that I didn't want to compromise on the "genuine human interactions" part of the vision, so rather than pivot, I opted to pause the project. I spent the rest of the semester working on rysumy.

Current Thoughts & Learnings

I still feel strongly that the idea behind Amitue, and the craving for quality human interactions, is a worthwhile problem to solve. I learned a ton from this experience, and I absolutely intend to revisit this with a fresh perspective. In fact, I've already started working on something that I hope will address many of the shortcomings I had with Amitue, but that's still under wraps.

Most of all from this experience, I learned just how much goes into running a startup. I expected to spend most of my semester coding away at this, but I actually spent much more time on talking to people, handling admin related issues, and lots of other non-development tasks. It opened my eyes to what running a startup really entails. I want to give it another shot, and I have lots of ideas on how I can build upon the experiences with Amitue to do even better.