Nightlife Planning App
Founding an app idea from scratch
As the Founder, Designer, and Developer of a mobile app for iOS and Android, I learned an incredible amount: from understanding product-market fit to working in a full-stack development environment on an end-to-end B2B2C product.
Problem Statement
I saw a lack of apps that made planning events and outings interesting, and wanted to see if there was a way to boost local economies with a tailored experience on iOS. By creating a B2B2C app, I hoped to bridge the gap and reduce the pain of making plans.
TEAM COMPOSITION
1 Product Owner/Designer
2 Full-Stack Software Engineers
4 Board Member Advisors
My Impact
Designed and shipped a native iOS app on the App Store
Received hands-on full-stack development experience
Learned about dual-sided markets and business strategy
From Notepad to App Store
Strategic Design Leadership
I embraced the role as a Founder in my quest to understand business objectives and aligning goals with them; I wanted to explore how the app could garner interest and revenue, and bolster local economies.
The journey of creating Thrillhop, a consumer-based mobile app for iOS that helps friends plan outings together, started as a simple concept—sketched in a notebook. I was sitting in my dorm room, envisioning a simple way for people to connect à la Snapchat, and stimulate the local economy through planned nights out (prior to the pandemic). The app evolved through iterative design phases and eventually materialized into a fully-fledged iOS app.
My initial sketches were rough ideas, but they sparked a sense of excitement that helped me explore the concept further. As I refined the vision for the app, I realized the potential for Thrillhop to make an impact from a social perspective. By creating an intermediate layer between people, to create plans to meet physically, the hope was to reduce the pain of rejection if someone didn’t want to go out. With the support of a passionate advisory board, I set out to explore a project that utilized creativity, technical skills, and an entrepreneurial spirit.
Iterating Towards Success
End-to-end Design
In this project, I embraced the spectrum of Design Thinking methodologies: Empathizing, Defining, Ideating, Prototyping, and Testing. This approach allowed me to incorporate feedback and refine my ideas without spending time and resources coding unproven solutions.
The path to success involved finding a sense of product-market fit. I began by talking with potential users and soliciting feedback. I showed early prototypes to friends and classmates to gauge interest and gather valuable insights. This iterative process allowed me to refine the app's concept and features and ensure I was creating a solution that business owners will pay for.
Listening to my target audience was useful in shaping Thrillhop into a tool that people genuinely wanted to use. I honed in on the features that resonated most with users, such as the planning and exploration aspect. This approach ensured that the app catered to the specific needs and preferences of the intended audience.
If I were to do this again, I’d spend more time on the simplest offering possible, via a minimal viable product, and testing that against my beliefs or assumptions. The power of prototyping lies in the ability to iterate on ideas quickly, and allowing oneself the ability to pivot if the idea needs refining or the pain isn’t there. I love the journey of creating things; the balance lies in creating the right thing.
Originally called Basehop, Thrillhop was an app for planning nights out and creating “informal invitations.“ In contrast to formal events on Facebook, the idea was to facilitate a simple platform that was entirely focused on creating a seamless experience for finding places based on their activity level (or other parameters), making quick plans, and optionally posting media.
Branding and Formation
Thrillhop needed a strong brand identity to stand out in a crowded app marketplace. I was quickly swept into the branding and design of the app. This can be a trap, as the visuals do matter, but not so much that they trump the underlying idea. The following quote sums up my experience with trying to make a visually appealing app out of the gate:
"If You're Not Embarrassed By The First Version Of Your Product, You’ve Launched Too Late" — Reid Hoffman, Founder of LinkedIn
Creating a brand for Thrillhop was about defining the mission, values, and experience I aimed to deliver to its users. I captured the mission and the financials of the app in a business plan and a subsequent executive summary. Going through the motions of completing these vital documents was a telling experience, due to the amount of learning and research I encountered. In conjunction, I set up a company for the app as well.
To house the intellectual property and create an entity for the business, I established a Delaware-based C-Corp. Through the company, I issued stock and formed an advisory board. This was a great experience, and I still look back fondly at the formation meeting with my lawyer and advisor.
Crafting a Seamless User Experience
Throughout the research phase and user alignment sessions, I started drafting the information architecture, low-fidelity wireframes, and high-fidelity prototypes of Thrillhop. I was chiefly concerned with creating a seamless user experience that was reminiscent of other top-downloaded apps. The best apps were simple to use but packed a lot of functionality across features that were used every day.
Once I had a foundation and understanding of what needed to be created, I aimed to bring my vision of the app to life through the prototypes; linking together interactions like picking places on a map and filling out event details with friends. It was during this phase that I fine-tuned the user interface and optimized navigation flows. By being able to visualize the user journey, identify pain points, and refine the app's design, I was in a good place before jumping into development.
The Tech Behind Thrillhop
Since development was the next step in the journey, which would require me to learn how to build mobile apps, I had to juggle reading documentation with designing the app. Luckily, my colleagues at the day job were able to support my app development efforts by providing expertise on the back-end and middleware services; expertise I paid for, but learned from in the process. We looked at tech stacks, cloud architecture, and API services, together.
Complex Problem Solving
In a handful of instances, I had to adjust the app to fit the feasibility I was able to bring to the table. By looking at the external factors such as API costs and library limitations, I saw how developers view problems and how they may address them.
Developing an iOS app, especially one reliant on geographic and place data, required a deep understanding of the nuances of native mobile services, vendor API services, and development environments. I was learning on the go, in some instances, but was driven by the idea of launching an app from scratch. I coded the app's front end in React, by leveraging expertise I had garnered from my days of web development, and developer libraries.
The development phase was a journey in itself, filled with challenges and breakthroughs. Throughout the project, I was picking up new ideas on how to implement ideas from the design of the app. Using React’s state management on various scopes was intriguing to me, and building out functional components could be fun, at times. In the end, I had an app that was built in React, with a middleware/API service layer built in PHP, a relational database with about 10 tables with pre-seeders, and a functional cloud environment for development and production environments.
Geolocation and Pricing Challenges
Lesson Learned
Having to understand the nuances of many moving parts can be exhausting—from the experiential interactions to the implementation in a full-stack environment, to the business angle. Enlisting more help to focus on strengths is a better path forward.
One of the primary issues I ran into involved place and geolocation data. On the front end, there was a question of how to implement place data without overcrowding/overloading the map. There were techniques that other developers had used, such as clustering points, and asynchronously toggling places based on interactions. I wasn’t quite sure where to go from here, but definitely experimented.
On the back end, Google Places was becoming more expensive to leverage, based on their pricing of API calls (which was updated just in time for launch). They have a rich collection of data for the types of places I was looking to include in the app—from bars to hotels, to arts & entertainment—but accessing that data was cost-prohibitive.
Looking Ahead as an Entrepreneur
Process Improvement
Through this project I have a refreshed understanding of the methodologies that I can leverage to create extensible and functional interfaces through an iterative feedback loop.
I discovered the importance of presenting prototypes before committing to expensive development, ensuring product-market fit was strong. I also saw the nuances of spend and how to reduce knowable costs. Having a keen sense of design thinking could alter the course of the business idea and how it came to be realized. Thrillhop's dual-sided marketplace required careful balancing to ensure both user groups found value in the platform.
This project taught me that the road to success in app development is about strategic planning, market research, and adaptability. Thrillhop's evolution from a concept in a notebook to a functional iOS app was a testament to a willingness to learn at every step of the journey. I’m excited about the potential to build more apps in the future, with this expertise in hand.
Outcomes and Results
Designing, developing, and funding Thrillhop showcased the significance of prototyping, user feedback, and a robust product-market fit analysis in the app development process. Articulating and refining the concept through iterations and learning about full-stack development led to a fully-fledged iOS app that filled a unique niche in the social planning space.
Disclaimer: Header image from Unsplash.
