Found
A community app for designers to share real-world inspiration, pinned to where they found it, built and shipped end-to-end with AI
PROJECT DETAILS
ROLE
I was the lead designer and developer for Found, designing and building it solo from scratch, owning everything from user research and ideation to a live, deployed app with a fully functioning product and landing page, shipped on Vercel using Claude Code.
CONTEXT
Found is a fully functioning AI-native Progressive Web App, designed and built end to end for my thesis project at Parsons School of Design. The app was also later showcased at Index China Town, and already has 19+ users on the day of release.
PROJECT
Social app, Location-based, Community discovery, Mobile
DURATION
8 weeks (2026)
TEAM
Riya (me!)
TOOLS
Claude Code, Supabase, Vercel, Figma
OVERVIEW
What is Found?
Found, a social platform that lets you share photos of inspirations you see on the street, where you saw it and why you found it inspiring. The app also allows users to follow friends or people whose taste users find inspiring.
Issue reported for:
Content
Dev
Others
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May
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Data Visualization
User Research
Iteration
Others (0.3%)
BACKGROUND & PROBLEM
Why did I build Found?
Designers collect inspiration everywhere, but most inspiration tools only show what's on other screens. The best finds are outside — hand-painted signs, chalk on the sidewalk, stickers, packaging in a corner store. These photos end up buried in camera rolls, and the location that made them special is lost
Inspiration isn't just on your screen.
This made me wonder: what if inspiration could stay pinned to the place you found it? That question became my thesis project at Parsons School of Design.
SETUP & PROCESS
Shipped end-to-end with AI
Found is a solo build — I was the designer, the developer, and everything in between. The product is a Progressive Web App built with Claude Code, using Supabase as the database infrastructure and Vercel for deployment, with a dedicated marketing site alongside it.
The app itself is organized around three things:
Explore feed
Map-based GEO view
Posts that carry a photo, notes, location, and tags
Explore feed
Map-based GEO view
Posts
The brand and the interface were designed together: the FOUND. wordmark and the "for real life inspirations" voice set the tone the app follows.
CHALLENGES
The use case challenge
Because Found looks like a social app — a feed, posts, profiles — people kept connecting it with regular social media. They read it as "share your life," not "share what you found," and that changed what they posted.
I had to make the use case impossible to miss. I curated the posts so the feed itself modeled what a good find looks like, created an onboarding that shows what Found is for before you post anything, and rewrote the copy across the app so every screen implies inspiration — words like "finds" and "notes" instead of the language of regular social media.
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The technical challenge
Map-based products are heavy: geolocation, image uploads, and real-time content are each big features, and I was one person shipping all of them. Choosing a Progressive Web App meant anyone could open Found from a QR code without an app store — but it also meant camera and location had to work through browser APIs, which took a lot of testing on real phones. Claude Code let me move fast, but every feature still had to earn its place in the scope of what one designer-developer can ship.
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LAUNCH & IMPACT
Showcased at Index Chinatown, used on day one
Found launched as a Progressive Web App with its own marketing site, and I designed printed cards with QR codes so the product could meet people out in the world — the same place its content comes from.
Found was showcased at Index Chinatown and reached 19+ users on the day of release — real designers, pinning real finds to the map.
