Student’s app, Zelse, explores the joy of exploring

The world, you may have noticed, is a big place. Kyle Bauder aims to make it more familiar with the power of Zelse.

Zelse is an app that Bauder, now finishing his Accounting degree at NAIT, built and launched this summer. The app gamifies exploration by offering users “missions” to go check out the world and then rewarding points for their completion.

“People love getting points,” says Bauder, “and they love having more points than other people.”

There are Zelse missions in 654 cities around the world and counting. All of them, right now, involve going somewhere and taking a picture of a landmark, like the Alberta Legislature Building or the Statue of Liberty. Users upload pictures to earn those ever-desirable points.

“I’m interested in seeing where I can go with it. I don’t have a concrete idea of how it’s going to turn out,” says Bauder. “Some users have asked about redeeming points at restaurants and things like that.”

Bauder has made a habit of getting going before deciding on his final destination. A mature student, he also holds a teaching degree from the University of Alberta and took coding courses from MacEwan University.

“Sometimes it’s not a straight journey to your destination,” he says with a laugh.

Zelse grew out of his completion of the Entrepreneurship Blue Book program, which is a self-guided course on starting a business run out of the Mawji Centre for New Venture and Student Entrepreneurship. Like all Mawji programs, Blue Book is open to all NAIT students.

Bauder enrolled in early 2026. He combined what he learned with his accounting knowledge to launch a small bookkeeping business.

“I was shocked by how easy it was to do some of the basics of starting a business,” he says. “Afterwards, it settled in my head: OK, I could do try this with something else.”

The money his bookkeeping business earns, Bauder noticed, grows in proportion to the time he spends on it. Could he make a business that, as he puts it, “is scalable and can impact thousands of people rather than something small and local”?

His initial idea was to build a “friend finder” app that would match users based on location and shared interest to send them on “friend dates.”

“I’ve tried some of these, like BumbleBFF, which is like a dating app for friends,” he says. “I didn’t like it much so I thought maybe there would be a market for a better one.”

After some refinement he shifted the question from “how do friends meet?” to “what do friends do?”

“They go out and do things,” Bauder says. “Maybe a movie, visit a landmark, visit a restaurant. Then I thought of the gamified element, like a Duolingo thing where people get points.”

After six weeks of intense work in his spare time, Bauder created a minimum viable product version of the app.

For a name he chose a character from Quest 64. It’s an homage to the obscure Nintendo 64 video game he remembers fondly. Zelse is the second boss and wears a Zorro-style mask.

“I don’t play games much now but when I was a kid I was obsessed, especially the Nintendo 64.” he says. “When I’m studying now I’m pretty much always listening to Nintendo 64 music.”

Zelse is only accessible right now through a web browser, which limits the audience for a travel-focused product. This is by design, as it lets Bauder test for bugs and gather user feedback at manageable pace. He’s submitted standalone app versions to Apple and Google.

The launch of Zelse’s proper smartphone apps will coincide with the escalation of his marketing strategy to create, he hopes, a major influx of users.

“It’s easy to make an app today but not easy to market it,” he says. “I’ve hired two young people to help make TikToks and they are going to make a ton of videos.”

Bauder chose a subscription model to monetize Zelse, where users pay a monthly or yearly fee to access the app. The other common business model for apps like Zelse is the so-called “freemium” one, where access is free but the user must endure in-app ads unless they pay to use the app.

“You do lose people with a paywall,” Bauder says. “People will see the app and then say it’s not worth my money. But my research found that freemium models lead more users but less revenue.”

If an accounting student building and launching their own travel-themed app before they finish their degree sounds unusual, Dennis Sheppard has news for you.

“It’s not that surprising,” says Sheppard, dean of NAIT’s JR Shaw School of Business. “I wouldn’t be shocked if an average year has four or five of these at NAIT.”

This is encouraged by the design of every program offered by the school, Sheppard says. Each business student is required to complete a course on “intrapreneurship,” which is taking an entrepreneurial approach to working as an employee. All NAIT students can also access entrepreneurial resources and mentorship through the Mawji Centre.

Sheppard says more resources and programs to help students start businesses are in the works, including a new “studio” concept that will connect aspiring entrepreneurs with teams of experts who can bring those ideas into reality.

Bauder, who has only a few courses left on his degree, probably won’t be on campus to take advantage of these new programs. But he might not need them, either.

“I don’t think Zelse is a billion-dollar idea,” he says, “but I think it might be a million-dollar idea.”