Intra startup
Intra is a mobile app created to help college students to study, collaborate, and socialize better during remote learning. Afterwards a version of the app for big companies was developed, to be used as an onboarding software to help them increase employee retention through community engagement.
Background
In 2020 I won a scholarship to attend an exchange semester in Pittsburgh, PA at Carnegie Mellon University. I arrived in the US at the beginning of January, and I was very excited to finally experience the famous American college experience so often shown in Hollywood movies. Unfortunately after 2 months the pandemic started and the campus clearly got empty in a few days and I found myself staying in Pittsburgh with another bunch of exchange students who weren’t able to go back to their countries like me. The situation was clearly not the best, we were away from our families during a pandemic, we were clearly worried, and all campus support services had closed.
One evening toward the end of March I was chatting on zoom with a classmate of mine, Snehita Sana, and we were talking about how difficult the situation was for all students at that time, and almost as a joke we started to speculate how we could make the situation as normal as possible for us and our classmates by trying to recreate the classic American college experience online, and this is how it started.
Problem definition
We started to research how students were dealing with the pandemic, first sending out a questionnaire, and after 2 months from the beginning of the pandemic we also started to collect some data from nationwide studies conducted from big corporations.
We discovered that already before the pandemic anxiety was the 3rd largest mental health problem in the world, but the number of people who suffered this illness was growing fast. Since the pandemic began 1/3 of Americans have displayed signs of anxiety, depression or both and the long term psychological effects of this can last over a decade. We also discovered that 60% of college students, specifically, have experienced overwhelming anxiety and this figure has increased significantly since the COVID-19 pandemic.
Through our research we identified 4 main causes:
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increased social anxiety due to isolation
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lack of support system and community disconnect
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inability to ask for help
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lack of awareness of resources
Our solution
We therefore decided to create Intra, an app made by students for students to study, collaborate, and socialize better during and after remote learning. We have created 4 features to address the 4 problems we have just identified.
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Buddies: with this feature, students simply have to fill out a personality form and they are then matched to fellow students who are also looking for new friends and who have similar personality profiles. In this way, students no longer have to reach out and initiate a connection which can be the biggest barrier in meeting new people on campus and can reduce their isolation.
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Events: being involved in extracurriculars in college is a big part of the college experience. Finding people who have similar interests is a part of building a strong community. That being said, it is much harder for student organizations to advertise events and for students to find groups that fit their interests. With this app, both organizations and students can advertise events and find individuals who have similar interests.
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Collaboration: going from high school to college is a very difficult transition. Moreover, asking for help in general is extremely hard, doing it over a 150 person Zoom call seems almost impossible. With this app, students simply add their classes to a list and then create and join study groups in seconds. There is no need to ask for help specifically, which can be a large barrier for students to get the assistance that they need.
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Resources: Universities have a lot of resources but they aren’t organized and easy for students to find. And when someone is in the middle of a crisis, they don’t have the time or the energy to be wading through ridiculous amounts of university pages to find the resources that they need. So it’s imperative that these resources are easily identifiable and accessible which is what we’ve done with this feature.
Expand your circle by meeting new people and sharing your interests with other CMU students.
Stay up to date on all University events and add them to your calendar.
Stay informed and find the support you need!
Expand your circle by meeting new people and sharing your interests with other CMU students.
Our team
At the end of May we had our prototype ready but we needed a team of developers to make this product real. Snehita and I started to reach out to some CS students to collaborate with us. We didn’t have any funding so it was difficult to find a team, but we managed to find 4 computer science sophomores who wanted to join our team. We then spent the summer developing the app and we launched it the first week of the fall semester, in September 2020.
The app was quite successful, we got more than 500 downloads in the first month and we received overall good feedback from the users. But we really wanted the app to be the best, so as soon as we launched it we started to work on a second version of it, we did a lot of user tests with users and we started to implement the findings in the new version.
Honors and awards
The workload was clearly increasing for everyone, there was a lot of work to do and also we were all having classes in the meantime, therefore we understood we needed more people to join us and furthermore we needed fundings to compensate all the employees. We started to participate in a lot of different competitions, all over in the States, and we won 3 of them. During the competitions we were helped by professionals to better develop our idea, and we received a lot of suggestions on how to pitch our project in the most effective way. Thanks to this journey we hired two more CS students and also 2 designers joined the team.
Promotional video
To participate in competitions and advertise our product I created a promotional video using After Effects and Premiere Pro.
Intra for new hires
In January 2021, while we were developing the second version of the app for Carnegie Mellon students, a new challenge showed up. During the fall semester we did a couple of interviews with the Pittsburgh Post Gazette and we talked on the radio of Pittsburgh about our project; thanks to the interviews a Bank in Pittsburgh contacted us, and asked us if we wanted to create a similar app for their workers, who were all working from home. We spent all the spring developing this new project, we tried to adapt the features we had to a work environment and we developed a protote. We decided to develop 3 features:
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Mentors: to allow new hires to connect with older employees and ask them for help. This feature should encourage the new employees to reach the more experienced ones, in fact, even if they have a lot of questions, they can reach out to as many mentors as they want.
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Messages: to stay connected with their colleagues and make new friends.
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Resources: Being in a new office can bring up a lot of doubts and anxiety, so it's important employees always feel supported, with links and resources to mental health services, articles etc.
Last steps
We realized pretty soon that we didn’t have the capacity and the resources to create such a huge project at the time, therefore after the prototyping phase the project didn’t continue further. In the meantime almost all the students came back to campus and started to socialize again in person, at the end of the school year we decided to close the platform.
Even if the project came to an end I’m very proud of the results we achieved. It’s important to consider that we encountered numerous limitations: first of all we didn’t have the financial resources to promote a project this big, especially when we decided to focus also on the office version of the app for the bank. Secondly, we were a very small team, and because of lack of fundings we couldn’t afford to hire all the people that we needed. And finally we were all very inexperienced, it was the first time for all of us approaching the startup world and we were all sophomores and juniors at the time.
But still I think I learned many precious lessons from this experience: I had the opportunity to lead a team of designers, and to improve my organizational skills. I also learned how to work with very tight timelines and to be ready to solve every inconvenience we encounter in the one year of activity. Finally participating in the competitions, helped by amazing mentors, helped me to understand how to effectively pitch an idea and to improve my public speaking.
Project overview
Professional Project: Intra startup
Duration: 1 year 6 months
Co-Founders: Nina Zanarelli, Snehita Sana
Design Team: Nina Zanarelli, Claire Lee, Shruti Prasanth
Developer Team: Sarayu Naminemi, Helen Dong, Shreya Manjunath,Eshita Kar