During my time at the University of Waterloo, I had the opportunity to build a startup of my own called Pave. It was a time management tool to help students improve and enhance their productivity. The motivation came from a problem I experienced after transitioning to the educational system in Canada as an international student. I struggled to maintain high grades in the first few years of university and witness a lot of my friends dropping out or switching programs due to the challenge of keeping up with school. It allowed me to research and find ways to support students through the school system and empower productivity to achieve one's goals.

Pave allowed users to plan by helping them create a timeline to break tasks into smaller, manageable chunks to enable outcome-driven thinking. Focus on a specific task by using a timer to keep track of all their activities one at a time. Keep track of achievements to help users keep a record of their progress towards goals along with the efforts to execute on them. Lastly, sending users helpful feedback and reminders on their performance to ensure maximum productivity.

Using my enterprise co-op terms, I was able to build out a team that worked with me to bring the vision to life. In the fall of 2015, we launched the iOS and Android applications to the App Stores. The team came together to create a video describing what the product does, which helped with a campaign we ran to acquire users.

Pave allowed me to walk through the steps of validating, defining, designing, and developing an idea into something hundreds of users could value in their lives. It was a learning experience that taught me the product development life cycle and also how best to work with people. Read more about my entire experience working on Pave.