This Student Outsmarted His University With A Game-Changing App

Tell us about yourself

 

My name is Manolis Vrondakis. I’m a 26-year-old Software Engineer originally from Sheffield, now based in London. I’ve been passionate about creating software since I was around 10 years old, when I first started building small websites. As a teenager, I sold my own mods for games instead of getting a typical side job. Over the years, I’ve developed and released numerous websites, apps, and other software projects. At one point, I even connected my microwave to the internet – though it wasn’t useful at all.

I’ve always wanted to become a software engineer, so after finishing college, I enrolled in software engineering at Sheffield Hallam University, where I came up with the idea and ultimately created my app.

Why did you decide to create a new university app?

 

I created SHUBetter because it was frustratingly slow to check my timetable on my phone. It took minutes to log in to a clunky, unresponsive website and click through a sluggish interface to reach the timetable. When you’re rushing to lectures and need to find your room quickly, this can make you late. It was a real problem.

On top of this, checking your grades, assignments, and making room bookings all had a similarly bad user experience. There were also no lecture reminders, leading me to miss lectures after forgetting to check my timetable.

In the summer before my final year, I decided to reverse-engineer the university systems and create a new, faster, and more efficient way to access everything I needed on mobile. I thought that even if the app didn’t gain any traction, it would still be valuable to me. SHUBetter was born.

How did you spread the word about the app to the student body?

 

Not expecting the app to get much attention, I initially only shared it with friends. Within a few days, it had 50 downloads, which I thought was amazing at the time, so I decided to spend £10 of my student loan on a Facebook ad.

I had set the app to notify me whenever a new student logged in, and suddenly, while I was sitting in a seminar, my phone was flooded with notifications. I was getting hundreds of them. A few days later, I remember being in a lift and seeing a random student using the app. It felt great.

Just over a week after launching, the app gained 3,000 student users. Surveys revealed that most users discovered the app through word of mouth, confirming it served a genuine need and was something people were excited to share with their friends. This year alone, over 20,000 students used the app, and during peak times, the app has 8,000 daily active users. There are around 32,000 students at Hallam.

 

What obstacles did you come across when creating the app?

 

I didn’t anticipate just how much work it would take to interface with the university’s systems. Without any access to internal documentation, I had to reverse-engineer everything. The login process alone is complicated and involves many steps. On top of that, the data for things like timetables, bookings, grades, and other services come from completely different systems, so I had to write a lot of code to extract all the necessary data and ensure the app could perform actions.

The university kept changing small things—like renaming fields or adding extra checks. For a while, these updates were happening almost daily, so I had to invest a lot of work into fixing issues and making the app more resilient. Once, while fixing the app to work with the university’s new timetabling software, I accidentally offset everyone’s timetable by a week, which led to some angry students who missed their lectures.

Figuring out how to hide the slow responses from Hallam behind a smooth user experience and ensuring everything is always available even when offline were fun challenges too.

 

What advice would you give to other young people who are planning to do something disruptive?

 

My main advice would be to just get started. Spending a long time coming up with a plan before you even know your idea works will slow you down or even kill your project. If I had planned everything out or waited for the university’s permission, SHUBetter wouldn’t exist today.

I’d also suggest trying to make something that you or someone close to you needs. I was a student making an app for students. Because I was the target user, I knew exactly what problems students had and which I needed to solve. This let me create something that was truly needed.

 

What are your plans after uni?

 

Since graduating, and nearly five years after launching SHUBetter, I’m now a professional software engineer making apps and websites. Alongside this, I’m still passionate about side projects and have continued to release a variety of new apps and websites in my free time. These include a daily picture challenge app called Picaday (https://picadayapp.com) and worlde-like daily word puzzle game called 21 Words (https://21words.app/)