College is a hectic time for most students. But it’s also a transformative time of immersing yourself in a new environment, meeting new people and finding a new community away from home. Two enterprising second-years — Abigail Hsu, a business economics and cognitive science student, and James Blue, a mechanical engineering student — sought a solution that bridged the gap between strangers.
Enter SquadUp Social, an app dedicated to college students that allows users to find casual in-person events within the collegiate community.
“This is an app that you should have at college, as it makes it better and easier to find friends to hang out with, which is the essence of college,” Blue said.
SquadUp Social boosts a range of features, integrating elements of similar social event-organizing apps such as Partiful and Poppin. It allows users to add friends in the app, post events and RSVP to activities, easing the process of both hosting and attending a casual event. While most apps focus on large-scale events, SquadUp Social allows users to host small peer-to-peer activities such as study groups or pickleball, making it easier to connect with peers on a casual basis.
“It was hard to find friends outside of clubs or roommate groups or even residential floors,” Hsu said. “It’s even harder to approach a stranger to initiate a friendship.”
Having met as members of the UCLA venture capital and technology club Bruin Ventures, Hsu and Blue took part in a pitch competition that served as the birthplace of SquadUp Social, which they continued to build post-competition.
With both Hsu and Blue being novices to programming and business, they decided to split the work across both the programming and business aspects of SquadUpSocial.
“The usual case for startups is to have one technical person and one business person, but we are both equally new to programming and business stuff, so why not do a mixture of both?” Hsu said.
“That way you can learn more about both,” Blue added.
They started in the winter of 2025, working with only test users, building this project from the ground up.
While challenging, the duo persevered by seeking advice from their fellow Bruin Ventures friends, connecting with people studying computer science in order to gain a sense of direction on how to build their app.
“Everyone in the startup space is so supportive,” says Hsu.
As a social app, SquadUp Social faced challenges with scaling as a result of network effects, where an app benefits from having more users in its ecosystem. In its early days, the app needed to build a base of users. To address this, Blue and Hsu reached out to people individually with a key focus on growing the user network as quickly as possible. Through their network of friends and by handing out flyers on BruinWalk, both founders were able to build their network up to more than 350.
For Blue, the most fulfilling moment came when he hosted a pickleball event and a student he met from putting up flyers showed up with six of their friends.
“Knowing that this app facilitated a friend group coming together and having fun was so fulfilling,” Blue added.
While new, SquadUp Social has big plans for its future. “I want to expand it to other campuses and grow the community,” Hsu said, adding that “in the long term, I hope that SquadUp Social becomes an app that is integrated in the user’s daily life, an app that they will regularly open to check and use.”
