Dozens of attendees packed Tommy’s Place Tuesday night, where LavaLab held their end-of-semester Demo Night. LavaLab, a student-run entrepreneurship club, awarded more prize money than ever before. 

LavaLab brings together students to design and develop an original product, and their semesterly Demo Night gives the student groups an opportunity to showcase their products. First, there was an hour-long expo in which attendees spoke to the groups about their projects and, after a fire alarm evacuated the building for 15 minutes, a series of presentations by groups to a panel of industry professionals. Attendees then voted on their favorite product demo and pitch. 

Pomelo, a site for clothing shoppers who are unsure about sizing that matches customers with content creators who have similar body types, won the Best Demo vote and a $1,000 prize. The judge panel awarded a separate $2,000 prize to Hue, a video app for product reviews, and Spotlight, a Google Chrome extension for event tickets, won a $1,000 prize for Best Pitch. 

Nikhil Patel, a junior majoring in computer science, is LavaLab’s president. He, along with the 10-member executive board, planned the event.

“Demo Night is a celebration of all these teams’ work,” Patel said. “The teams demo their ‘MVPs,’ which are minimum viable products […] We’re getting up to $4,000 in prizes, which is more than we’ve ever had.”

Seven groups, each with four people, showcased their products — starting with Pomelo. Project manager Cat Tang said her work was inspired by her own shopping experiences. 

“I’m pretty short and that always poses a problem for me if I want to size, say, pants online,” said Tang, a senior majoring in cognitive science  “One way we’ve found people overcome that is they try to find influencers who are wearing those products in similar sizes. We centralize that.”

Anay Karwal, a junior majoring in business administration, is the product manager for Leap, an app that lets parents manage a virtual credit card for their children, teaching kids about financial literacy and allowing them to build credit. He sees a viable market for his product because of the value financial knowledge it provides.

“We definitely think this is a product that every single 10 to 17- year-old in America can use,” Karwal said. “Three out of four teens aren’t comfortable with the amount of education they have with financial skills, so we think that this is a really good spot.” 

In addition to product managers are designers, one on each team, including Andrew Kim, the designer for Pomelo. Kim, a sophomore majoring in arts, technology and the business of innovation, said he gained valuable experience this semester in the club.

“You get a lot of guidance from previous designers from the club,” Kim said. “[My team] learned a lot about how  seemingly good ideas can also be bad ideas and why just solving certain features and making really cool products isn’t necessarily going to be a winning start up idea.”

Rounding out each team are two developers. Scott Susanto, a senior majoring in computer engineering and computer science, is a developer for Spotlight. 

“We’re responsible for bringing designs to life,” Susanto said. “Translating [them] into code, adding functionality, stuff like that. [LavaLab] is special for us developers because it’s a place where we actually build the product and make it come to life.” 

Anjali Patel contributed to this report. 

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