BUILTIn development

StartupLink

A closed network where students and verified student founders can find each other.

My role: Founder and full-stack developer — sole developer
Timeframe: April 2025 – present
Status: In development
Team size: 1

The problem

Student founders and students wanting early-stage experience are hard to match. Open platforms make posting easy but trust hard; institutional channels are trusted but slow and closed. StartupLink is the middle: a small network where founders are verified first, and access follows role.

I owned1/4
- Framed the problem; decided what v1 would deliberately not do
- Built the auth flow, including the email-domain check gating founders
- Enforced the role model in database security rules, not the interface
- Multi-step onboarding with partial progress persisted across sessions
- Student–founder messaging interface
- Responsive interface design and implementation
Constraints2/4
- Sole developer, around a full-time diploma
- Trust is the product — verification had to work before anything else was worth building
- No budget for paid identity verification
- No user base to validate against; a two-sided network needs both sides
Outcome3/4
- Working MVP deployed and publicly reachable
- Founder verification runs server-side in a cloud function, so it cannot be bypassed from the client
- Role access enforced in Firestore rules — a modified client still cannot read another role’s data
- Onboarding survives a dropped session
Learned4/4
- Authorisation in security rules rather than components is what made fast iteration safe
- Verification was a product problem before a technical one — defining proof of founder status was the hard part
- Building both sides of the network at once was the wrong sequence; the student side was easier to validate first