Whether it’s shark cage diving in Hawai‘i or entering the product management field,  Navya Singh, a senior majoring in business administration, said she always tries to embrace new experiences. With her new social networking app, Linkd, Singh is encouraging USC students to do the same.

Linkd is a mobile platform designed to connect college students with similar interests through video creation and specialized group channels. Linkd launched on the Apple App Store Feb. 13 exclusively at USC, requiring users to provide a University email to sign up. The initial release at USC will help Singh refine the app and determine if Linkd can expand to other colleges. 

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Singh said she hopes Linkd will become a consolidated platform students can use to meet each other on campus.

“[Linkd] is different in the sense that there’s going to be specific channels and groups catered to the specific college rather than having to go and make your own platform [where] you can’t really connect with everyone at the school,” Singh said. “A lot of the connections that college students have are online, so I wanted to make it an online space with channels for these college students to find people who have hobbies and similarities.”

When the app launched, Linkd supported a dozen community channels for a variety of interests, such as sports, outdoor activities, arts and food. 

Salvador Lopez, a freshman majoring in legal studies, said the University has clubs for his interests, such as the Trojan Debate Squad and the Trojan Marching Band, but that it’s been more difficult for him to find people with less-common interests. 

“[USC supports] major, more broad interests … especially with clubs and stuff, but for more niche interests, like my comic books, it’s really just [through] talking to people to find out,” Lopez said.

Singh said she always wanted to create an app and had been brainstorming ideas for a startup since she began college before eventually coming up with the idea for Linkd. The app serves as a personal passion project for Singh while she interns at Microsoft as a product manager. She said the internship has given her insight into how to manage her own product — with her long-term goal being to start her own technology product company.

“I’ve always been very fascinated by products, apps and disruptive technologies that can help people,” Singh said. “This is completely separate from my professional career. It’s just something that I’m truly passionate about.”

Singh began attending USC during the pandemic, and when she arrived on campus in the spring, she found that it had become harder for students to connect with each other. While she recognized a communication problem, it wasn’t until her junior year that Singh fully developed the idea for Linkd.

While serving as an Undergraduate Student Government senator in 2023, Singh noticed there was a communication gap between USG and the student body that stemmed from a lack of communication channels between the two parties. During her term, Singh also served as vice president of the USC Panhellenic Council, where she saw students weren’t going out of their comfort zones to meet people outside of their sororities. These two experiences gave Singh the idea to build an app that would connect students after the pandemic.

“I think there was true value in this idea that I saw, especially with college students in the post-COVID world,” Singh said. “[Linkd] would be really beneficial, especially for younger kids, like freshmen and sophomores and transfers, when they’re newer to campus and don’t know as many people.”

Alan Herrera Armenta, a freshman majoring in health promotion and disease prevention studies, has an interest in poetry but has found it difficult to find students who share his interest. Herrera Armenta said he knows college students that use dating apps, such as Tinder, to meet people with similar interests.

“I definitely haven’t heard anything about a poetry club or anything of that sort, so I feel like it’s limited. You just [have to] get to know someone by luck,” Herrera Armenta said. “Maybe I’m wrong, but I just haven’t heard of any poetry clubs.”

Singh manages the business side of Linkd and co-develops the app with a contracted developer. She hopes to expand Linkd’s features and spread the app to other universities but doesn’t have set expectations or specific goals for the app. 

“The entrepreneur in me just really wants to see if this is something that helps students, that students use every day, that they start to adopt as part of their lives like TikTok, Sidechat or Instagram, and see from there,” Singh said.