SYT — short for "See You There!" — came out of a personal need: to bring a few more random encounters into my life.

A serendipitous encounter

One of my first days in Zurich, I was standing at a bus stop and started talking to a random girl. Within a few minutes, as I was telling her about Omnia, it turned out that she had actually reviewed my application to the HAX accelerator in Shenzhen (Luca and I had applied there in the summer between my bachelor and my master's). A few months earlier she had been working at HAX in Shenzhen, and now we were having a serendipitous chat at a bus stop in Zurich! Needless to say, we became friends — and about a year later we worked together on a project for the Ubiquitous Computing class [link to come].

Engineering serendipity

That random encounter made me think a lot about how many opportunities I had missed by not talking to the random people around me. For a while, I forced myself to talk to literally anyone who walked by. Then I thought: "there must be a better way."

SYT was the better way that Luca [link to come] and I came up with to engineer serendipity.

The SYT logo: a white shaka (hang-loose) hand gesture over a burst of rainbow-coloured powder on a white background.

The Shaka logo was inspired by a vacation I'd taken, right before moving to ETH, at a surf camp in Portugal. Everyone there was so friendly and easy to talk to. With SYT, we wanted to bring that same friendliness to the cold city of Zurich.

On campus

Within a couple of weeks, the ETH campus was full of SYT "ads", and a few friends were starting to use it (mostly because I forced them).

A printed sheet of SYT flyers, each with the Shaka logo, a QR code, and the line "Join SeeYouThere! and meet people around you!" A hand holding a phone showing the SYT logo as the app's splash screen.

The app was quite basic but functional. We created pages for the main student hangout spots in Zurich, and people could register their interest in going to a place to meet random people.

The SYT Explore screen — "Popular around you" — listing Zurich spots by category, like the Urbansurf bar and the Student Village residence, each with how many people signed up. A place page in SYT for Urbansurf, with a description and a "Go there!" button to register your interest. A map view in SYT showing student places around ETH Hönggerberg. The "People there" screen in SYT, listing who is planning to be at a place and what they're up to — study, conversation, or "get drunk".

The cold start

I wish I'd read The Cold Start Problem back then — though I probably would have tried anyway. As autumn and then winter of 2020 arrived, the second wave of the Covid pandemic hit again, and meeting random people was no longer an appealing proposition. After a month or so of working on SYT, we were back to working on Omnia.