From "Drunk Craigslist" to Purpose: What Seniors Taught Me About Building Solutions

This challenge has taught me the art of ideating, prototyping, testing, and revising. For example, the initial version of SasoGPT was, in my dad’s words, "a drunk Craigslist," which was harsh but accurate. The font was too small. The process of uploading a suspicious message was too complicated. I had built something that worked in theory but failed for the actual people who needed it.

After further revisions, I brought the updated version to a senior resource fair and asked people to walk through it while I observed their responses. Seniors would get stuck on basic steps I hadn't even considered difficult—like taking screenshots. Each interaction showed me how my experience with tech was vastly different from theirs. The many incorrect assumptions I'd made forced me to redesign the interface multiple times, create tutorial videos, and simplify every instruction. It was humbling to realize how little I understood about my users' needs and how important it is to put yourself in your customers’ shoes.

Conducting a market analysis of cybersecurity products pushed me past this abstract thinking and into the real-world economics behind the problem. I realized that none of the big companies were building solutions specifically to protect seniors, and worse, many were profiting from the ads scammers use to find their victims. The economic theories I’ve learned from the UCLA Economics Summer Institute began to reveal themselves in real life. Seeing “rational” actors like Meta and Google behave in their own self‑interest while seniors paid the price reframed the whole challenge: it wasn’t just about building a clever app; it was about confronting a systemic failure and shifting the incentives so the market actually protects older adults.

Applying the Design-Thinking Approach I've learned helped translate that big-picture insight into a focused, human-centered solution. Instead of treating scams as an abstract cyber issue, I started by asking who was being hurt most and how their lives were affected. That's when I narrowed my problem from "fixing all scams" to "protecting seniors from fraud," and reimagined SasoGPT not as another generic "scam checker," but as an interactive, game-based education system that walks seniors through realistic scam scenarios and gives them instant feedback.

Most importantly, spending time with seniors taught me to redesign my idea around their needs. Now, when I think about SasoGPT, I don’t just see a product; I see a way to recalibrate a broken equilibrium and to model a different kind of leadership for my generation. My goal is no longer only to detect scams but to prevent them by empowering older adults, inspiring more young people to pay attention to the injustices seniors face, and helping build markets and technologies that actually protect them.