Rami's Universe

Cannon Lachapelle Award - v1

8 min read

1

The University of Calgary defines entrepreneurial thinking as “being creative in finding innovative solutions. It involves taking initiative, exchanging knowledge across disciplines, being resourceful and learning from experience.” With that in mind, please answer the three questions below (Max. 500 words total): A. What does entrepreneurial thinking mean to you and how have you been entrepreneurial during your time at UCalgary?
B. Have you engaged with the entrepreneurial thinking supports at UCalgary? List any entrepreneurial thinking activities including relevant courses, co-curricular programs, events, and competitions.
C. How will this award help you advance entrepreneurial thinking journey, educational and professional goals

For me, entrepreneurial, thinking means having a very strong vision that not a lot of people see or understand. You continue to refine and adapt this vision with the end goal of creating something that actually solves the problem you intended to solve. in other words, you have a destination that nobody else has determined to reach no matter, and you are determined to reach it no matter what obstacles come your way by constantly pivoting, adapting, and innovating. This is the definition that I came to have over my time shipping products and creating content while being a full-time student at UCalgary. (more about that in the next question)

Here’s the timeline of the entrepreneurial activities. I have engaged in over the past year:

I’m a true believer that community is the most important aspect of life. Forget the job opportunities and career advancements, it’s also about life satisfaction. I can’t stress this enough. That’s what life is all about. The People. Nothing is worth doing whatsoever if it’s not for the people or with the people Receiving this award will enable me to continue to meet more people who are working on a similar problem and have life ambitions that align with mine. It will also help me continue pursuing Orbit and building free, open-source products that ultimately help reduce loneliness, especially within universities.

2

Describe a challenge that you have been working on solving with an innovative or entrepreneurial idea that you believe will improve lives. The challenge could be an example from a research project, participation in a social enterprise, startup or campus initiative, a social innovation project via a community organization, working with a government entity, and/or an intrapreneurship initiative (innovation within an organization). With that challenge in mind, please answer the six questions below (Max. 500 words total):

A. What is the problem or challenge you identified and how did you identify and validate it?
B. How did you deepen your knowledge of the problem or challenge? What research has been done? C. What solutions did you come up and why did you choose the solution you are working on?
D. What partnerships have you/will you pursue and why?
E. What impact have you had to date? Or, if just starting out, what impact could this solution have?
F. Where are you in your development of the solution and what are the next steps?

  • Over this past year, I have spent over 800 hours working on 2 mobile apps—Exo and Orbit, and a couple hundred hours filming, editing, and releasing over 20 videos
  • These 2 open-source applications & community that represents everything that I stand for. For over a year, I’ve been working on using technology to reduce the barrier to human connection. I started off with building an app called Exo that helps people have better conversations with their partners and friends. Then ten months ago, I started working on Orbit, an app/platform that aims to fight loneliness in university.
  • I’m also a recovering socially anxious person who struggled to value themselves and deeply bond with people. This mindset impacted every area of my life. Thankfully, through learning and continuous trial & error, I learned so much about human nature. Now I want to share that wisdom with the world through content like YouTube videos and tech like apps.
  • Throughout all this, my top priority was to build Orbit — a project I see as my magnum opus and the culmination of my vision and everything I’ve learned and continue to learn 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 went around Campus, especially dining halls, and interviewed people to get a better understanding on what their struggles are in making and finding new friendships. So was that information we started building the platform.
  • unfortunately, four months later we started to discover pitfalls/problems in our approach that we were not aware of previously. As a result, we decided to pivot which costed us hundreds of hours in refactoring (code modification). After successfully refactoring, we had an opportunity to live demo our app with several testers who attended the event hosted by the Hunter Hub in the collision space on April 4th.
  • That week before April 4th was absolute chaos for me. Had to work on group projects for my 5 courses that I was taking while also putting in 40+ hours on getting the app to fully function properly. I really wanted to do as much as I could before April 4th because I wanted to get as much feedback as I could possibly get.
  • It was also at that time I started building a community on Discord 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:
  • We generally got positive reviews on the app but I was hoping that people would be more excited about the idea. This is what I am currently working on. 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.
  • In terms of partnerships, I have talked with The Landing in the Dining Center building, where all first-year students who live on campus eat in. They agreed to help me market the app inside the dining hall. This is perfect for us since the dining hall is the best place to meet new people and people in The Landing are exactly who we are targeting.
  • I also just recently launched another app that helps people deepen their relationships by enabling people to have more meaningful conversations: https://apps.apple.com/app/exo-have-better-conversations/id6740080383

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