DeparturesCase study 03 of 07

Boarding passPM 103
PassengerPRATEEK MEHTA
DateApr to Jul 2026
Gate03

galpals

DestinationWomen-Only Friendship App for Bangalore

Founding PM

CrewBuildathon · Team of 6
StatusLIVE
Problem
Women new to a city, or whose circle has thinned, have no good tool for finding real friends.
What I did
Led discovery, wrote the PRD, designed every page and ran QA on a 6-person Buildathon team.
Result
Blank page to a Product Hunt launch in 4 days.
  • Safety-First Design
  • Scope Discipline
  • Systems Thinking
Visit live siteRead the PRD
Screenshot of galpals on a phone
Fig. 1 · galpals

Dating apps are the wrong context. Professional networks are the wrong intent.

Interest groups solve for the group, not the individual. The gap is a product that takes safety seriously, respects time, and gets out of the way once two people click.

What I owned

Discovery, the full PRD (what made the cut and what didn't), every page's visual design and UX flows, and end-to-end QA. One teammate owned development; the rest of the team pitched in on testing and strategy.

No feed. No groups. No games.

Every member passes a human-led video or phone verification before seeing matches. Each week brings a small scored set of nearby women, each with a reason you'd click. A wave with a preset reason, or 100 characters, opens the door; mutual waves open a chat.

lifetime waves to one person
3
until a wave expires
30 days
characters per wave
100

Slower on purpose.

  • Manual verification. Automating it would be faster, and would kill the safety promise that sets galpals apart.
  • PWA over native. Easier to try, faster to iterate, no app-store gatekeeping.
  • Matching on what predicts friendship, not popularity: interests, neighbourhood, city tenure, personality.

Easier to find a friend, not harder to leave.

Second person always. 14-word sentence cap. No emoji in system copy. Banned words: journey, tribe, vibes, community, seamless, authentic, curated.