Tooki: a product designed to turn doomscrolling into real plans

Tooki is a mobile app created to offer a clear alternative to passive scrolling. Instead of endless feeds or super-curated profiles, the app shows swipeable plans that you can join that same day. These are real activities, happening now or within the next few hours, designed to be experienced offline with other people.

The product is intentionally simple. Every time you open Tooki, the idea is to give you a better option than staying home scrolling. Plans have a limited time and disappear after 24 hours, which pushes immediacy, low commitment, and presence. The phrase “Do something” works as a guiding principle, both for communication and for product decisions.

I co-founded Tooki and led the product from concept to launch. My role spanned product vision, strategy, UX, go-to-market planning, and overall decision-making. Development was done in close collaboration with a team of three engineers, while I handled product direction end to end.

Problem definition and objectives

Social platforms are structurally optimized to retain attention, not to generate real-life interaction. As a result, boredom often ends in scrolling, while coordinating spontaneous plans outside existing friend groups remains difficult.

Instead of framing the problem as “screen addiction,” I reframed it as a product imbalance: consuming content passively is very easy, but doing something in real life is not.

To structure this hypothesis, I developed an initial Lean UX Canvas that helped align the problem definition, user segments, value proposition, and viability assumptions. The canvas also served to identify the product’s main risks, such as liquidity, social friction, and online-to-offline conversion, which later guided many of the UX decisions.

Product vision and scope

Tooki was designed to prioritize real-life action over passive digital consumption. Instead of optimizing for the user to spend more time inside the app, the goal was to help them leave it quickly, but with a concrete plan to do right away.

The scope was intentionally kept narrow to nearby, short-term, time-sensitive activities. Plans expire within 24 hours and require very little commitment, reinforcing the idea of immediacy over endless browsing.

We also decided to leave out complex profiles, feeds, and long-term social graphs. The idea was to reduce coordination friction and focus everything on a shared action.

The following framework summarizes the product’s purpose, its operating principles, and the tangible outcome it aims to generate.

Brand identity and direction

In addition to product direction, I developed Tooki’s identity so the brand would reflect the product’s same core idea: less screen, more real life.

The brand had to feel simple, spontaneous, and approachable, without falling into the aspirational or hyper-curated tone typical of many social apps. Tooki does not aim for the user to build a perfect version of themselves, but to find something to do now. That is why the identity was approached from a more direct, playful, and action-oriented logic.

The naming and the mascot come from a very simple idea: going back a little to acting like apes. Getting out of hyper-digital mode, stopping overthinking, going back to playing, moving, meeting up, and enjoying simple things in the real world. Tooki proposes recovering something more analog, more impulsive, and more physical: do anything, as long as you get off the scroll.

From that concept comes the monkey as the brand mascot: a young, flexible, and expressive character, capable of conveying energy, humor, and spontaneity without making the app feel childish. The mascot works as an extension of Tooki’s tone, a friendly nudge to put the phone down and do something.

The “Do something” concept served as the starting point for the verbal and visual system. The brand uses a simple tone, almost like a friendly nudge, with short, action-oriented messages. Visually, the identity combines vibrant, youthful, and energetic colors with more expressive graphic resources, such as illustrations, stickers, and dynamic visual elements that reinforce the feeling of movement, spontaneity, and low pressure.

I also developed a visual system designed to scale across the app, landing page, social media, pitch decks, and launch materials, maintaining consistency without making the brand overly rigid. The idea was for Tooki to feel recognizable, but also loose enough to adapt to different kinds of plans, moments, and communities.

The identity was not treated as a separate aesthetic layer, but as a tool to reinforce the product proposition: making it feel easy, approachable, and socially light to join a plan.

UX problem prioritization

UX problems were prioritized according to their direct impact on offline action. The main focus was to reduce friction between opening the app and committing to a plan, because any delay or complexity increased the chances that the user would return to passive scrolling.

Prioritization was guided by three criteria:

• Does this reduce the time between discovering a plan and joining it?

• Does this lower the social friction between people who do not know each other?

• Does this increase the likelihood that the plan will actually happen in real life?

Secondary initiatives, such as advanced personalization, deeper profiles, or long-term engagement loops, were intentionally left for later. Any feature that could create comparison, mental overload, or unnecessary extra time inside the app was left out of the MVP to maintain clarity and momentum toward action.

Information architecture and user flows

The information architecture was designed to be as simple and action-oriented as possible. From the moment the user opens the app, they go directly to the available plans, with no intermediate dashboards or unnecessarily deep navigation. This reduces cognitive load and keeps the focus on deciding, not exploring.

During the design process, multiple user flows were mapped and tested. Below are some representative examples of how we structured the key interactions to reduce friction and speed up the move from intention to offline action.

Main discovery and commitment flow

Onboarding flow

Plan management flow

Defining success metrics

Tooki’s success was not defined with traditional engagement metrics, such as session length or daily retention. Optimizing for users to spend more time inside the app would directly contradict the product’s purpose: reducing passive screen consumption.

Instead, we defined success as measurable movement from intention to a real action.

We designed and monitored two main behavioral funnels:

Joiner Funnel (participant)

• First swipe interaction

• Chat started

• Activity attended

Host Funnel (plan creator)

• Plan created

• First like

• Chat started

• Activity confirmed

The idea was not to reduce drop-off at any cost, but to identify the friction points that kept users from reaching a real interaction. Optimizations focused on speeding up the time it took to create or commit to a plan, not on extending time inside the app.

Some key indicators were:

• Time from onboarding to the first interaction with a plan

• Plan creation rate per active user

• Join-to-attendance conversion

• Host-to-participant conversion

• Chat-to-offline-meetup conversion

Separating host and joiner behaviors allowed us to assess the health of both sides of the system without relying on traditional engagement metrics.

Solving the cold start problem

Because Tooki depends on real-time participation, liquidity is the main launch risk. That is why the strategy prioritizes geographic density over broad acquisition. Instead of trying to grow everywhere at once, the idea is to activate specific areas first and expand afterward.

Plans created by Tooki help seed initial activity, reduce empty states, and speed up local traction before scaling.

Building the MVP

After defining the product direction, I put together a small development team to build the MVP. I led roadmap planning, prioritized features according to their impact on real activation, and structured implementation in incremental phases.

The focus was to validate the activity-first model quickly, avoiding unnecessary complexity. I coordinated the sequence of tasks and made sure the product vision, UX decisions, and technical execution stayed aligned throughout the build.

Website

Landing page designed for early access and controlled activation.

Mobile App

Onboarding

Main navigation

Plan creation flow

UI Preview