How It Started

Where the Question Came From

One night Jonathan and Jeremy stayed up until 2 AM playing a newly released Roblox update, mostly because neither of them wanted to log off and risk waking up to spoilers all over their group chat. The next day, Jonathan couldn't stop thinking about it: he could focus on that for hours without trying, but thirty minutes of homework felt like a fight.

It felt like a small, kind of dumb observation at first. Then he started asking friends if they felt the same way, and almost everyone said yes. So instead of just assuming he knew why, he figured it was worth actually looking into.

Turning an Idea into a Team

Jonathan had worked with Jeremy and Ryan on a game jam the year before. They didn't think about problems the same way, but they worked well together and didn't just agree with each other to be nice. When Jonathan brought up the question, nobody asked what app they should build. Ryan just asked what they actually knew about the problem.

The honest answer was: not much.

So instead of building anything right away, the three of them decided to start with research first. Looking back, that's probably the decision that shaped everything else about how this project has gone.

Following the Evidence

Our first real hypothesis leaned on FOMO: the idea that the same fear of missing out that keeps people glued to games could be pointed at studying instead. We didn't want to just build around that hunch, though, so we went and read the academic literature, ran a survey, and did a round of interviews.

The research didn't back up the FOMO idea nearly as much as we expected. What kept showing up instead was motivation and something closer to social presence: the sense that other people are around and doing the same thing you are. That's the direction our work has been pointed in since.

Building While Still Learning

We've tried not to treat research and building as separate phases. Each interview or survey response tends to nudge the next version of our thinking a little. Cohort, our first prototype, is a product of that: it's not there to prove we were right, it's there to test whether the presence idea actually holds up. If it doesn't, we'll go back and change it.

Why We're Putting All of This Online

We didn't want to just post the finished thing at the end and skip everything that happened before it: the surveys that didn't go anywhere, the assumption we had to drop, the version of the idea we almost built before the research talked us out of it. If Cohort works, great. If it doesn't, we'd still rather have written this down than not.

We're still three high schoolers figuring this out as we go, and we expect a lot of this to keep changing. Thanks for reading this far.