WITHIT | Nicolas Walker

Withit App (Background)

I was a member of the founding team for the withit app, and served as Lead Designer and Chief Creative Officer.

"withit" is a social platform that simplifies social planning, coordination, and discovery.

We raised $700K, received support from Accenture's incubator, and became profitable after a long 4 years.

Opportunity

We noticed fragmentation and friction among the college-aged demographic when it came to event coordination.

Due to ease of communication and access to real-time information, college kids were using platforms that were not created for event coordination, for event coordination. (Such as Instagram and Snapchat.)

Nonetheless, these platforms never fit the bill in their efficacy to coordinate events because they weren't built for it, and so we saw the opportunity to create a dedicated event platform that integrated with these platforms in order to offer a quick, fun, and hip option for young people to create "micro-events".

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Launching an MVP

I initially founded this company with no design experience whatsoever beyond a pen and paper, which is what I originally used to communicate our vision to the team we originally outsourced to.

I was the first point of contact for this outsourced team and was able to learn a ton about the process of professional product development.

As we worked together, I simultaneously chose to learn UX/UI design myself, as I sensed we would ultimately need to bring everything in-house in order to move with speed.

Major Pivot + Stepping into Lead Design Role

Our assumption was correct, and immediately after launching our MVP, we decided to in-house everything for the sake of autonomy and speed.

I had enough design skills to lead design at this point, and I had also worked with the outsourced development team for long enough to hire my own team, manage it effectively, and know how to communicate with them.

I led a code handoff from our old team to our new in-house team whom I recruited and hired myself.

This team was compose of 7 young engineers with collective experience at Google, FB, Amazon, Microsoft, and Apple.

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Design Overhaul

For ages, I had been waiting to have intimate access to our app, and to be able to rapidly iterate with it.

Once we had everything in-house, our first mission was to do a massive overhaul of our entire user experience, and to simplify it in major ways.

Our main focus was to prioritize our UX in a way that drove event creation - which was the core driver of our growth.

In the process, we changed just about everything, and I got in and coded with swift a few times before we scaled our development team to 7 people.

Scrappy Solutions

One of the biggest obstacles we faced was while we were gaining traction at the University of Virginia.

Fraternities, sororities, and local venues were beginning to use our app, although our apps speed was causing concern.

We recognized that while our newly established front-end was working, our backend was not nearly as optimized as it needed to be in order to sustain large amounts of traffic.

In hindsight, we recognized that we made the mistake of upgrading our entire user experience and adding a ton of new features without making significant changes in our backend architecture. The result was a super slow app that irritated users.

We allowed our vision and momentum to get in the way of what was necessary to build a sound architecture that could actually hold our new feature sets.

So, one of our scrappy solutions (while we began to restructure the backend), was to implement smoother transitions on the front-end, and to do everything possible to minimize the actual loading time, and in some cases the perceived loading time.

Big Feature Launches

I was known at our startup as being the visionary who would think many steps ahead.

Throughout my tenure I initiated an in-app ticketing system (which allowed us to monetize), an interests feature and an explore page (which personalized the app for each user), our story feature that integrated with Instagram and Snapchat that amplified adoption, and of course, our main UX/UI overhaul once transitioning in-house.

Despite 2000+ downloads and increasing retention by 77% over 1 year, the pandemic slowed our momentum quite a bit, despite us chugging along for quite some time.

Ultimately, after 4.5 years at withit, I decided to step away. I felt as if I contributed everything that I was meant to.

Soon after, the team disbanded entirely and everyone has moved on.

What I did in my 4 years @withit

I managed our engineering team. (I led our weekly full-team meetings, daily sub-team meetings, and weekly 1on1’s.)

Defined sets of KPIs and A/B tests (to measure user satisfaction and business impact)

Defined product roadmap and overall vision.

Served as Lead Designer Chief Creative Officer (created our UI/UX from scratch once bringing everything in-house.)

Accomplishments at withit

Achieved profitability in November 2020

Raised over $700,000 in funding

Support from Accenture's incubator program

2000+ downloads

Here's more of the user interface... (using Figma, Sketch, and Invision)

and some cool social media content...

I said goodbye to withit in June of 2020 to move onto other projects.

While it was a difficult decision, it seemed that I had contributed all that I was meant to.

I cherish every moment with the amazing team we built.