Manufacturing Serendipity: Meet Jazmine, Founder of Heat
- Circles House
- 13 hours ago
- 6 min read
The best nights out often come down to being in the right room with the right people at the right time. We sat down with Jazmine, a designer who has called Barcelona home for eight years, to hear how one dead bar crawl in Berlin turned into Heat, the app she is now building to help people find exactly that room. Below, she shares her story firsthand, lightly edited from a recorded conversation for length and clarity.
Tell us about Heat and where the idea began.
I'm Jazmine. I'm a designer. For the past eight years, I've been in Barcelona.
A couple of years ago I was in Berlin and I had a friend visiting me, and we were going from bar to bar to bar, and every place was so dead. She just turned to me and said, I just want to go where there's hot guys and good music. So I developed a philosophy around that. I wanted to find places in a new city that matched your vibe and allowed you to connect with the kind of people you wanted to be around, and really embody who you are in that moment, because it can change from night to night.
I thought it would be great if there was something responsive, like a live heat map, that was like, this is the thing that you're looking for, it's over here. For the past year and a half, I've been developing this concept, testing and building. Now we're here, just launched. It's called Heat App, live on the App Store. We launched in Barcelona for now, in June. We had a great launch party, a lot of fun, and a lot of people have heard about us.
What has building and launching Heat actually been like?
It's really difficult to build something from scratch. A social product has this cold start issue, which is basically nobody knows about you, and until people know about you, the product has little value. We have been on a journey of what can we offer people that will grant them the excitement that we are hoping to share in the product while we grow. We're doing our marketing completely bootstrap, which means we're paying out of pocket and we're doing it boots on the ground, walking around ourselves. It's not the easy way, but it's been a journey.
How did you find your cofounder, Abdi?
I am not alone in Heat, I have a cofounder. His name is Abdi, and we have been working together now for like a year and a half. It's difficult enough to have a good work environment with somebody and connect with people in that way, but then something as intimate as a cofounder relationship, so I got really lucky. I started to build something called Heat Chat, which was the AI that will fuel the Heat app, and I needed someone to help me build it. I put out a post on a group and Abdi reached out to me. He's a developer, and he helped me build the very first version of Heat. In the process, we realized that we liked working together, and he really loved the idea behind it and the philosophy behind Heat. So we decided in April of 2025 that we would make it official and work together.
It's the same with most things, you're trying to find a partner or friend, you can't just ask for these things. You have to put yourself in a position, because it's a little bit luck. But I think the key thing that you can do is just start building. So for anyone who is looking for a cofounder, I recommend to start building and pursue whatever is this passion of yours that would make you want to go into entrepreneurship, and then have conversations with people and network. The right people will come to you, and the people who are interested in what you're building will reach out.
You call yourself a dreamer. How do you get into execution mode?
I think by trade, I'm a dreamer, girly, but the world is run by doers. The sooner you can tap into that part of yourself, the quicker you will realize that it's going to take that in order to achieve the things that you're setting out to do. There are a number of ways that people can get into execution mode, and I think a big part of it comes from starting small, just starting with anything and getting it out there. The biggest hurdle is overcoming the fear of what other people are going to think, and wanting it to be perfect. That's my personal challenge. It's never going to be perfect. You just got to do it. Just do it crappy and see what happens.
What's the part of building a company that nobody talks about?
It's hard. I consume a lot of other founder content and things, so I'm like, is there anything unique that people don't talk about? From my own experience, it's very lonely to build a product, to build and make something on your own, because the traditional way that things are designed is that you should have a 9 to 5 and you should have a steady paycheck. It takes some privilege to be able to step away from that, and that comes down a lot to support from others as well, to be able to say, well, I'm going to risk it all. The people I encounter are going to look at you and be like, oh, that's okay, but there's another product like that, or didn't that other product fail. You're going to have to just know internally that what you're doing is the right thing to do, and if it's not, you'll be able to figure it out.
What's the biggest mistake you've made building Heat?
We took way too long to get to market. I really need to drive this home, it's so important to just get the MVP, the minimum viable product, out there. Whatever you're building, get it out as quickly as possible. It's the key to success, because you're going to iterate, the first version is not going to work, it doesn't matter what you do. It's not that you should just make something ugly and gross and put it out there, take the time to make it quality, but whatever the problem is, try to find one solution for that problem and ship that, put that out there and see how people respond to it, and then you can iterate and keep growing and building. We added so many features and spent a lot of time building features that the core flow is not even perfected yet. That was so goofy of us to do. Let that be a lesson to anyone who's building now.
How much do you think being in the right place impacts your journey?
I personally believe that it's fifty percent of it. You can say this with relationships, with jobs, with everything, a lot of things come down to timing. We actually had a VC call us serendipity as a service. Serendipity means it's when two things happen and they just happen coincidentally, and then it changes the course of your life. So we built Heat on the premise that what if we could manufacture it in an organic way, serendipity. If we have the ability to know that there's two people that have similar interests, we can coax them into being at the same cafe at the same time. Heat is not a dating app, but it's about being around the right people.
What's next for Heat?
Like most businesses, we need visibility, we need people to give us a shot, and we're always open to investors. A part of the Heat app is checking in, so when you check in to a location, you can see the other people that are there, which helps with that serendipity moment, because we've all been in a case where we've been like, oh, that person is so cool, I love how she does her hair, he's cute or whatever, and it's like, I wonder who they are. That's why we built checking in. Feedback we've received was to introduce more discounts with businesses, so we've been building partnerships, with this idea of a punch card where you go a few times and then get a free drink.
The next big thing for Heat, it's funny enough, I'm taking my own advice. We're trying to simplify and get back to just the root of solving the problem. We just want people to know where they should go in a moment. Thirty seconds, you open the app, you're in the city, you've lived here for a year, you've been here for two days, where do I go next? I want that place to have my vibe, my people, my music. We should answer that for you in thirty seconds.
Any advice for someone thinking about making the leap?
I'm such an advocate for taking a break and taking a risk and getting out there and giving it a shot. Figure out what it's going to take for you to take that risk on yourself at least once in your life. I highly recommend it. You can always go back to corporate, you can always rebuild, but you won't always be young and free and able to do these things. If it's something that feels right and it feels you, I would encourage those people to do that, and they can always reach out to me. If anyone wants any conversations or wants to just ask questions, I'm here for that as well.
