Zeal

During Summer 2023, I worked at Zeal, a startup in the consumer social space looking to reinvent the process of building real-world relationships through in person events. At Zeal, I am a full-stack developer, working on both the frontend and the backend of the Zeal iOS app. In addition to general improvements to the app and bug fixes based on user testing and feedback, my first main focus has been on improving the event scheduling experience by integrating a chat bot client within the app. The idea behind this is to leverage natural language understanding to create a seamless experience for users to be able to schedule group events.

Next, I worked on Invitations, a key part of the app and process to onboard new users to Zeal. The idea was to lean into the key tenet of any successful social media app - virality. The focus surrounded leveraging the networks of existing users to act as the conduit for inviting their friends to the events and groups they organized on Zeal, and hence bringing in new users to the app.

I worked on creating features that now allow users to invite friends through text messaging, email, and push notifications (if they already have the app). The feature pulls directly from your phone contacts, and sends out all the necessary information with the tap of the button.

In case an invitee forgets to act on the invitation, users also have the ability to resend invitations, check who invited who to the group, and also recieve scheduled invitation reminders to make sure they don’t miss out.

Technologies used:

• React Native
• Typescript
• HTML/CSS/JS
• Firebase
• Twilio/SendGrid

It was super exciting to work at Zeal during its stealth stage, emerging from the alpha testing phase to a public beta just a few days before the end of my internship. The opportunity to partake in a very product-centric engineering role and build out features from ground zero was invaluable. I sincerely appreciate the mentorship of the Zeal time and am excited to see what they achieve next.

Check it out here and give it a download from the app store!