Anew is a smartphone application you can easily install from Google Play, that dramatically changes how your smartphone OS looks and works - allowing you to treat personal issues of smartphone overuse, and reduce daily chronic anxiety.

Anew allows users to create routines on their phone to compliment their real world lifestyle. It allows you to limit access to applications, websites, and notifications during parts of your routine when they distract or impede how you'd really like to live your life.

Anew doesn't just leave you to figure this out for yourself. It adds a combination of educational references and custom features to your phone to enable you to make the best decisions for your lifestyle, as easily as possible.

GAD-7 SELF ASSESSMENT AVERAGE ACROSS STUDY PARTICIPANTS USING ANEW

By combining effective education and features, Anew can reduce your daily chronic anxiety over a longer time horizon than any other treatment product. Users have reported to feel anxiety relief within just 24 hours, with a significant reduction in daily chronic anxiety after a month of use.

My Role

As founder, I drove both strategy and execution across research, design, product, engineering, and business.

Given that, my strongest contributions centered on product design, research, and strategy.

For example:

• Research & Design Strategy: Built the research foundation and treatment model, designing and running a 30-day/user pilot that directly informed product principles.

• Product Design & Prototyping: Designed end-to-end lofi flows and hifi treatments in Figma, and prototyped in Kotlin/Compose.

• Engineering & Technical Strategy: Selected and implemented the stack and cloud infrastructure (Compose, Firebase, AWS S3), iterated on and established data model, and implemented the product.

• Business & Market Strategy: Constant ongoing evaluation of risk and viability - created pilot with kill/no-kill criteria, scoped public MVP for validation under tight runway and acquired advisors and partnerships.

• Hiring & Mentorship: Structured and hosted 7 unique internships across disciplines, aligning intern growth goals with company needs.

• Marketing & Communication: Leveraged intern-created brand system across product high-fidelity, marketing materials, and product website.

This combination of breadth and depth taught me how to turn research into product strategy, strategy into design systems, and design into validated outcomes - while leading others and keeping execution moving under significant constraints of time and resources.

ROLE DIAGRAM

Collaboration

My collaboration style with advisors, interns, and users was usually broken into larger design cycles.

As I was executing research, design, and development, I typically decided to break the work into larger cycles. This allowed me to conduct research, iterate on design options with users, then develop the entailing feature(s). Then restart the cycle.

Within each cycle, I scheduled meetings to review with industry advisors with relevant experience to the feature's purpose. This spanned advisors from disciplines of engineering, design, psychology, psychiatry, marketing, and more. These advisor prospectives, along with user input, allowed me to maintain a clear picture of effective strategy. This was critical in pursuing a complex problem space like individualized smartphone mental health.

KEY ADVISORS

Where Anew Stands Now

I consider Anew a successful product in regard to its treatment efficacy, however it is not yet commercially viable.

Though it does have a steadily growing user base, and is built on pioneering research I was able to conduct in partnership with Carnegie Mellon University.

The fact is, today Anew is being used all over the world by people looking for self-administered treatment for anxiety and mental health concerns. If anything, that certainly feels like a win to me.