Zelospace

Social networks connect people across the globe. This illusion of connection has only been driving a wedge in society. The loneliness epidemic has been spreading with countries appointing ministers of loneliness. Thats the problem Joe and I started with: helping university students beat loneliness on campus. We had both been there, as freshmen, exchange students, and as immigrants.

We wanted students to be able to find people like them, and form connections around them locally. So we had to build something that would help them find people they wouldn't know.

At the heart of Zelospace was passion. Literally... "Zeal". Instead of discovering people based on the chance that you already know them -- a skeuomorphism of their physical network -- we wanted to build an alternative network built entirely on a student's passions. More than that, we wanted them to grow, thrive, and take it to the big stages.

We built competitions as the core activity. Brand sponsored competitions. So when we launched our first music competition with Hard Rock Cafe, London with the winning prize being a chance to play an evening at Hard Rock Cafe, students jumped on. Same with a dance competition with Pineapple dance studio, and my favorite one: a Razer sponsored gaming competition.

The most rewarding experience was when we started seeing dance competition participants organically starting colabs. It was working!

As CTO, I owned the product end-to-end. This included the mobile app on both platforms and the cloud infrastructure (AWS). We started with the core application for students, but as brands started joining us I initialized a brand-facing application giving our sponsors and partners the freedom to launch competitions.

Zelospace hit organic growth and we grew to 1000+ users on campus by the end of the first year. The platform validated that interest-based discovery fills a real need in campus social life. I also generally think small-scale, niche, and localized social networks will be deeply valuable in the coming future. No, I don't mean groups on large social networks...