Connect.Camp: A Vision Unreleased
Role: Founder, Product Designer, and Team Leader
Timeline: Developed alongside Mentorpedia operations
Status: Never Released
The Vision
While building Mentorpedia, we recognized an additional gap—universities lacked a centralized, professional networking platform where students could connect, collaborate, and grow. From this realization, Connect.Camp was born.
Connect.Camp was envisioned as a university-level professional networking app designed to foster meaningful relationships among students, alumni, and mentors. It was our attempt to create a space where career aspirations met practical guidance, and where the power of networking could transform lives.
Key Features
Connect.Camp combined the essence of Mentorpedia with a focus on peer and alumni connections:
Professional Networking: Students could create profiles to showcase their academic achievements, projects, and career goals.
Mentorship Integration: Mentorpedia’s mentorship feature was seamlessly embedded, enabling users to connect with experienced professionals.
Campus Collaboration: Tools for forming groups, organizing events, and collaborating on projects within the university ecosystem.
Skill Endorsements: A system where peers and professors could endorse skills, creating a credible portfolio for users.
We believed that fostering connections during university years would set students up for long-term success, building bridges between academics and industry.
My Role: Expanding the Vision
Product Design
Designed the app from the ground up, incorporating features that encouraged interaction and engagement.
Conducted interviews with university students to understand their pain points and integrated their feedback into the product.
Team Collaboration
Worked closely with our developers to ensure the app’s performance matched the user experience.
Managed timelines and resources to deliver a polished product, even as Mentorpedia’s operations were ongoing.
Strategic Integration
Envisioned Connect.Camp not just as a standalone product but as an extension of Mentorpedia’s ecosystem.
Positioned it as a tool that would eventually bring users to Mentorpedia for advanced mentorship opportunities.
The Journey
Developing Connect.Camp was both exciting and challenging. We were driven by the potential impact it could have on university students and the connections it could foster within educational institutions.
Unfortunately, as we struggled to find product-market fit for Mentorpedia and faced resource constraints, we had to make the heartbreaking decision to halt all operations. Connect.Camp, though fully developed, never saw its public release.
What Connect.Camp Taught Me
Even though the app didn’t launch, working on Connect.Camp enriched me with invaluable lessons:
Vision Expansion: How to evolve a product idea into a comprehensive ecosystem.
Balancing Resources: Managing priorities between multiple projects under tight constraints.
User-Centric Design: The importance of deeply understanding niche user groups and tailoring solutions to their needs.
Resilience: Accepting that not every idea reaches its destination but still holds immense value in the journey.
Reflections
Connect.Camp remains one of my proudest projects, not for its release but for the thought, effort, and potential it represented. It was a testament to our belief in the power of mentorship and networking, and a reminder of the challenges and rewards of building products that aim to make a difference.
Though it never went live, Connect.Camp stands as a milestone in my journey—one that taught me how to dream big, execute with precision, and accept the twists and turns of entrepreneurship with grace.
