03 — 2024 — 2025
UW-Social
A student-centered event discovery and community platform.
Visit project ↗- Role
- Founder & Project Lead — 9-person team
- Stack
- FirebaseFirestoreGoogle CloudGeminiReact
Problem
Campus event information is scattered across email, Discord, social media, and org websites. Students burn time searching and still miss things worth attending.
System
A Firebase-backed platform centralizing discovery, community interaction, and personalized recommendations, fed by a newsletter ingestion path that turns unstructured email into structured events.
- Ingestion — subscribed newsletter accounts parsed into structured event records
- Data — Firestore collections for events, notes, and user profiles
- Intelligence — Gemini for summarization and recommendation
- Community — Discord and WeChat loops feeding content back in
My contribution
- 01Founded and led a 9-member cross-functional team across engineering, design, and marketing.
- 02Defined the product vision and development roadmap.
- 03Ran user interviews and two rounds of validation, then drove iteration from that feedback.
Engineering decisions
Solving the cold-start problem
Problem
Without enough event supply, students see no value — and without users, organizations do not post.
Decision
Narrowed to engineering and business events instead of chasing full campus coverage, and built direct relationships with student organizations.
Tradeoff
Lower initial coverage.
Outcome
Higher information quality and a defensible first audience.
Scalable event collection
Problem
Most event sites restrict large-scale scraping, so automated aggregation was unreliable.
Decision
Collected newsletters via subscribed email accounts and converted them into structured event data.
Tradeoff
Extra preprocessing per source.
Outcome
Stable long-term collection that does not break when a site changes.
Results
Growth metrics
Lessons learned
- Products come from continuous user feedback, not feature accumulation.
- Solving the right problem is usually worth more than building more functionality.
Next project