Student mobile app
A campus-first app for discovering events, buying tickets, seeing who was going, and sharing plans with friends.
The challenge
Why the obvious build path was too risky.
Campus life is fragmented across society chats, social posts, ticket links, and informal recommendations. Students struggle to find events they actually want, while societies and organisers need better tools to sell tickets, manage attendees, validate entry at the door, and turn demand into sustainable revenue.
The approach
How the work was made smaller, clearer, and more accountable.
- Led product and engineering decisions as CTO across the student app, organiser web platform, scanner app, event creation, ticketing, attendee, sharing, and society workflows.
- Built the product around real campus behaviour: students wanted to see what was happening, who else was going, and how to share plans quickly with friends.
- Added semantic discovery using LangChain, LangGraph, and Pinecone so students could search by intent and context instead of relying only on exact event titles or categories.
The outcome
What the team gained beyond shipped code.
- A mobile, web, and scanner product suite that supported student event discovery, ticket purchasing, attendee visibility, door entry, organiser management, and society revenue.
- Grew from a single university to five, including Oxford and Cambridge, as the platform proved itself campus by campus.
- Societies and organisers had a single operating flow to publish events, sell tickets, scan attendees, manage audiences, and reduce operational friction around campus nights.
- The product direction helped bridge campus community, commerce, and AI-assisted discovery before the platform later evolved beyond university life.
