Fourth year creates an app that plans your night for you

Andrew Garden, a fourth year International Business Management student at the Robert Gordon University, has created the next big student app for planning a night out or in.

What about a interactive social media app that allows you to combined your social life, personal finance, university timetable, food, as well as health and wellbeing?

Andrew, the app creator

Student Sins, a team of 20 students led by Andrew, have made this possible over the past three years by conducting market research with over 100 students in Aberdeen. Andrew said he started to create the app in his first year, but said that his badly organised study and social life in high school led to the creation of this multi-purpose app.

The first stage of this project is Lust. Lust is the social life side of the platform.

The idea behind it is pretty simple, you have three options; Going Out, Taking it easy or Can’t decide. By clicking on one of the three, the app allows you to monitor what your friends are doing that night and helps you to decide what plans you are going to make.

Even though Facebook has an event option, we often forget about what events we are attending. Lust is more real time based which allows you to view throughout the day what your friends are deciding to do and even notifies you about what they have decided to do in order to aid you in your decision.

The three main options

Emma and Katie, both 3rd year Fashion Management students who are volunteering with the project, explained the reason they got involved:

“We learn all of these things at uni, but it is completely different when you have to actually manage a business or a particular department.

Katie, who was 17 in her 1st year said, “I did not go out when I was 17, so it would have been useful to find others in Woolmanhill Halls to find others staying in. You feel a bit isolated and this would have been a great way of to avoid having to Netflix and Chill on your own, but being able to make new friends that you may have not met before.”

On whether the app would help students get lucky, Fiona, another volunteer, answered that:

“That is not the purpose of this app, but that definitely drives people to go out. So if you see all the hotties going to Underground then you will also go out.”

At this point Andrew explained that there are measures available to stop people from stalking others: the app accommodates for some users not wanting to be found.

The Student Sins Squad

The next stage includes a group of apps which will work in tandem, for example Greed is an app which helps people with their budgets. It asks you about your weekly food shop, how much your night out cost you, how much your rent is and then tells you how much you have left to spend for the next month.

It also allows potential students thinking about coming to Aberdeen  to see how much it will cost for them to live here.

The website is currently in its Beta stage and is available to students in the Aberdeen area for now, but plans are in place to expand it to cities with high student populations. Livin, 24 and in charge of business strategy, said that the Android app has also been launched to a group of 100 students to test out and the iOS app is soon to be launched too.

Andrew, the app creator, and his PA, Brodie, are hoping to take this project on as a full time career but said that it depends if Lust kicks off. Andrew explained that it was an expensive project as each app costs around £50,000 to fully develop and they are planning seven of them.

We spoke to some students around the campus to ask them what they think about Lust and the plan for the other apps:

Graham, 1st Year International Business Management student

“This app allows for effortless decision making and clarifies your schedule with Ease. ”

Sarah, 2nd Year Accounting and Finance student

“If it does work it would be really good, but for it to go viral they need to get everybody at RGU to be involved and all the clubs signed up. ”