this post is a draft 🌱
Context
I've spent a large amount of time on college campuses other than my own. I realized students at other campuses love creating things for other students, course planners, parking trackers, & more. I started pondering, how can I bring a slice of that culture to Cal Poly Pomona?
Process
My projects always start with some sort of a product specification / PRD in Figma to get myself thinking. Concurrently designing a solution in words and design helps me move fast.
I tested different variations of an idea to bring together a student population that mostly commutes and is always on the move. Some first versions looked like a sticky note wall of inspirational messages, a "what's in my bag" tote bag, but I ended up landing on a r/place style canvas, framed as an Etch A Sketch.
I designed in Figma, used Claude Code for implementation, and deployed initially on Google Cloud Run. 20 flyers soon popped up around all around campus.
The backend was later migrated to Cloudflare Workers because I ran out of free credits haha.
Outcome
The Etch A Sketch became a makeshift bulletin board.
1,000 visits in 2 weeks
25,000 blocks drawn
45% vistor → painter conversion rate
Retrospective
This project refreshed my perspective on product and how to market. Having the technical implementation completely written by AI helped me move faster to focusing on what I cared about, design, product, and marketing. Here is what I'd do differently if I kept working on this project
Request permission to put up flyers
"Ask for forgiveness, not permission." I didn't expect the campus to take down my flyers that quickly, which wasn't great in hindsight. With the flyers gone, traffic dwindled.
Give students a reason to keep coming back
One time usage is great; however, real products require retention. To have users return, I'd implement some sort of prompt on what to draw, ex. "me when finals week" or "draw a horse."
Increase time between resets
The canvas reset every 12 hours. Seeing a blank canvas definitely drove users away, as they wouldn't want to interact with a dead product.
