Rami's Universe

Cannon Lachapelle Award - v3

7 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 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:

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. 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. I plan to join the Launchpad program as I continue iterating and pivoting to hit PMF with Orbit

On the partnerships front, I’ve been in touch with The Landing in the Dining Center building, where all first-year students who live on campus eat in. They’ve agreed to help us market Orbit inside the space. 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.

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