Over this past year, I have spent over 800 hours working on 2 mobile apps: Exo and Orbit, and a couple hundred hours creating 25+ videos. These open-source apps and the community around them represent everything I stand for: using technology to reduce the barrier to human connection.
10 months ago, I started Orbit, a platform to fight loneliness among university students. As someone who recovered from social anxiety after years of struggling to connect with others, this mission means a lot to me. From the start, Orbit has been my top priority — my magnum opus and the culmination of everything I’ve learned about human connection and the psychology and sociology behind it. When the idea of Orbit first came to life, it was very different to what it is right now. Around September, I began interviewing students in dining halls to better understand their challenges with forming new friendships. So with that information, we started building the platform.
Four months in, we discovered major pitfalls in our approach. We decided to pivot, which cost us hundreds of hours in code refactoring. After recovering, we demoed the app at an event hosted by Hunter Hub on April 4 with several testers. The week leading up to the event was intense. I was juggling three group projects across my courses while working over 40 hours to get the all the features implemented. I wanted Orbit ready so I could gather as much feedback as possible.
At that time I started building a Discord community to be able to directly talk to people excited about the app and willing to provide feedback. In just the 2 weeks before the event, I managed to get the server up to 120 members through 3 avenues:
- YouTube videos like the Orbit manifesto: https://youtu.be/vaBTLpGfVQE and app demo: https://youtu.be/QI8HgFye-m0
- LinkedIn post: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/rami-m_ive-spent-over-600-hours-building-two-open-source-activity-7309608620374040577-GicY
- Being a walking billboard around campus. I wore a giant QR code linking to our Discord server across campus every day for weeks: https://photos.app.goo.gl/V2BrX1nzapNhVq7RA
- It led to spontaneous conversations, rapid user growth, and even a local news feature: https://livewirecalgary.com/2025/04/18/ucalgarys-qr-code-wearing-superhero-to-launch-his-loneliness-solution-in-fall-2025/
- As mentioned in the article, my goal is to create 100,000 UCalgary student meetups in the first year of launch
Feedback was generally positive but I was hoping that people would be more excited about the idea. This is what I am currently working on. Exploring different ideas and testing them out quickly. So that by the time fall semester comes by, Orbit would be ready to launch and empower new students to find their people, build their crew, and forge lifelong friendships and relationships in the most frictionless way possible.
The other app that I’m also actively looking for feedback and looking to iterate and flesh out is Exo. I launched an MVP but it’s also far from reaching PMF. The youtube short I attached below is the Exo app walkthrough that I use in my app’s onboarding.
The other 2 links are from a hackathon win I had where I experimented with a possible direction for Orbit: One that’s filled with AI Agents and automations. Since this idea has already kinda been built by 2 rising startups: boardy.ai & series.so I’m still looking for different ideas in the space of GenAI and AI agents because there is so much potential in it in the context of social networking. People are building dating apps that revolve around GenAI like https://ditt.ai/ from a Berkeley dropout. I’ve worked with AI Agents and GenAI but I’m still in the exploratory phase where I’m not sure what differently I can do compared to the 3 startups I mentioned
I also linked the Orbit manifesto below (https://youtu.be/vaBTLpGfVQE) where I share the pillars I am following and will continue to follow no matter what happens to Orbit and where I decide to pivot from here.
One idea that I’m exploring is combining these 2 apps into one. So it would be both, a personal relationship manager and a finder. The no.1 personal CRM specialized for university students. That will take quite a while to build tho😬 But as always, since I have the will, I will find the way. And if I get to join the Afore program, it would accelerate and increase my chances of success. So I’d love to go on a 10 min call (or more) to discuss this further. C u then🙂