Neha, 25
“I wish I had someone to go to that new café with.”
UX Designer at a mid-stage startup. Moved from Jaipur to Bengaluru 3 weeks ago. Has energy and income to explore but goes home after work every day because she has nobody to go out with.
DESIGN CONSULTING · 2025, PRESENT
BestBuds
Four strangers. Seven days. One shot at the kind of friendship that actually sticks.
Design consulting for a friendship-matching app, from founder sessions and market positioning to a complete design system, user flows, and 40+ screens across light and dark modes.
Here is something nobody warns you about when you move to Bangalore for work: you will find the city. The city will not find you friends.
Your colleagues are friendly, they'll add you to the lunch WhatsApp group, invite you to the team outing at that brewery in Indiranagar, maybe even share their Swiggy One subscription. But "friendly" is not "friends." It's a polite holding pattern at thirty thousand feet.
The apps don't help. Bumble BFF treats friendship like dating (swipe, match, ghost, the whole dismal carousel). Meetup.com is fine if your idea of connection is standing in a room full of 40 strangers with lanyards. And the Instagram 'community' pages? They're excellent at selling you the idea of belonging. The belonging itself is not included.
BestBuds started from a sharper question: what if you couldn't skip the awkward part? What if, instead of infinite choices and zero commitment, you got exactly four strangers, seven days, and a structure that made the uncomfortable-but-necessary work of actually getting to know someone feel less like a job interview and more like the first week of college, minus the ragging.
“ 
”
“So, how do I actually meet people on this? Just swipe?”
“ 
”
“No swiping. You join a Campaign, and BudBot locks you in a room with four strangers for 7 days.”
“ ”
“And if I don't like them?”
“ ”
“Then at the end of the week, you don't pick them. No awkward rejection, the group just dissolves.”
THE FOUNDERS
[SESSION 1]
Where the thread starts
I didn't walk into this project through a job board. I walked in because Manab, the founder, had the specific, slightly haunted look of someone who'd moved to a new city and realised that the infrastructure for making friends as an adult is approximately: none.
(He'd also volunteered at a hospice, watched loneliness in its final form, and decided to do something about it. But we'll get to that.)
The founding team, Manab, Kedarnath, Shibasis, each had their own version of the same story. Moved cities. Lost the old pipelines. Found that the 'apps for friends' space was either too gamified, too shallow, or too weird. Their hypothesis was refreshingly precise: friendship needs structure, not serendipity. A time-bound, facilitated group experience where you can't swipe away the moment someone says something slightly awkward.
Who are we building for?
Ravi, 28
“I want to play football and do weekend treks.”
Backend developer at a remote-first company. Moved to Bengaluru 6 months ago. Works from home. Bumble BFF matches fizzled out after small talk. Needs activity partners.
Priya, 24
“My friends are great, but we don't share hobbies.”
Content writer born and raised in Bengaluru. Has a solid friend group that is into pubs and partying, but she wants to explore pottery classes and sunrise yoga.
THE WORK
💔
The old way
Endless profiles. Decision fatigue. Ghosting after two messages because someone else swiped right on the treadmill.
🫂
The BestBuds way
Curated small groups. Structured activities. Earning reveals. Actually showing up for the conversation.
[DESIGN PILLARS]
Six rules. One friendship engine.
Campaigns, Not Connections
The core unit is a Campaign: a 7-day group experience with ~5 strangers, structured daily by BudBot. It has an arc, icebreakers, prompts, voice notes, a poll, a game, building to Decision Day, where mutual picks become permanent friends.
Progressive Disclosure
Photos are hidden until Day 7. Names and neighborhoods unlock gradually. Voice notes arrive mid-week. Each reveal is earned, not given, reversing the dating-app pattern of front-loading everything and watching interest decay.
Structured Warmth
The design language is warm cream, ink, and one coral accent, with BudBot's honey-amber as a dedicated voice. Typography mixes Fraunces display with DM Sans and IBM Plex Mono. The app feels like a letter from a friend who happens to be very well-organized.
No Vanity Metrics
No followers, no likes, no public profiles you can endlessly scroll. Your profile shows Campaigns joined, Buds kept, and Meetups attended. The stats that matter are the ones that require showing up.
BudBot as Facilitator
BudBot isn't a chatbot. It's a matchmaker-mascot with three states, thinking, hyped, neutral, that drops daily prompts, runs games, and nudges quiet members. It has personality without being in the way.
Decision Day
The culmination: private picks of who you clicked with. Mutual picks unlock a permanent chat. Non-mutual picks simply don't, no rejection notification, no awkward reveal. The group chat stays regardless. Friendship without the cliff.
[THE CAMPAIGN]
Seven days. One arc.
A single campaign, start to finish, from the design files.
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DAY 0 01Join a Campaign
Browse open campaigns by vibe, join one, wait for it to fill. The Matching Lobby shows slots assembling, your four strangers are being picked by an algorithm that matches on interests, energy, and three psych dimensions. While you wait: micro-tasks to complete your profile.
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DAY 1 02Day 1–2: Icebreakers
BudBot drops the first prompt. Names and neighborhoods visible, photos locked. "If you all met at a kitchen table, what's the dish someone has to bring?" Tap-to-answer suggestions lower the activation energy. The conversation is gently forced. This is by design.
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DAY 3 03Day 3: The First Hang
A mid-campaign poll lands: "Saturday plan, pick one." Sunrise hike vs. brunch & flea market. The group votes; a plan takes shape. This is where the app earns its name, it bridges chat into the city.
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DAY 5 04Day 5: Voice Notes
Voice intros unlock mid-week. Suddenly the person who types in perfect punctuation has a warm, slightly nasal laugh. Waveform voice messages with emoji reactions. The bond deepens, the medium shifts, and so does the intimacy.
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DAY 6 05The Game
A 60-second BudBot game, Two Truths & a Lie, with a leaderboard that exists for exactly one round. Locked Day-7 photo previews (blurred) keep the anticipation alive. Momentum boost for campaigns that might be fizzling.
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DAY 7 06Decision Day
Photos reveal. Then the private vote: "Who did you click with?" Pick your people. Mutual picks unlock a permanent DM, the friendship survives the campaign. Non-mutual picks? The group chat stays. No rejection cliff. Just the gentle truth of preference.
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∞ 07It's Mutual
The payoff. Two avatars, confetti, one line: "It's mutual." A permanent friend unlocked. The chat carries a small origin marker, "You kept each other · Sunday Morning Crew", because friendships deserve a memory of how they started.
[THE DESIGN SYSTEM]
Two modes. One warmth.
The entire design system ships in both light and dark variants, not as an afterthought toggle but as a first-class citizen from Day 1. The dark mode isn't just 'invert the colours and hope for the best', it's a carefully tuned navy palette where BudBot's amber and the coral accent actually glow. (We tested 5 theme variants: Light, Sepia, Slate, Dark, and Midnight. Because apparently choosing a palette for an app about friendship is harder than the friendship itself.)
[SCREEN INVENTORY]
40 screens. Two modes. Zero filler.
The final delivery: 40 unique screens covering every user journey, from onboarding through verification, the daily campaign loop, events, profiles, and all the edge states (empty, error, confirmation). Each screen exists in both light and dark mode. No wireframes-that-became-the-actual-thing. No "we'll figure out the empty state later." Every state designed, every edge case considered.
[MY ROLE]
What 'design consulting' actually meant
Let me be specific about what 'design consulting' meant here, because the phrase covers everything from 'I made a mood board once' to 'I rewired your entire product.' This was closer to the second.
Founder Sessions & Research
Market positioning, competitive landscape mapping, founder interviews, user persona definition. The work that happens before anyone opens a design tool.
Information Architecture
User flow architecture, the 7-day campaign structure, 3-layer trust model (algorithmic matching → structural safety → tonal safety). The skeleton.
Design Language & System
Complete visual identity, colour, typography, spacing, components. 40+ screens in Pencil. The reactive design system across 5+ theme modes. The skin.
Microcopy & Language Rules
7 hard language rules. "Campaign" not "group." "Kept Buds" not "matched friends." Every word earns its place. The voice.
This is an active engagement. The app is in development. The design system is being translated into React Native. If you're interested in the process, the messy, iterative, occasionally argumentative process, there's more in the garden.
Illustrations by Pablo Stanley (OpenPeeps & Transhumans)