Anthropals

Anthropals working!
Team photo

Inspiration

As startup founders who work remotely, we struggle with loneliness and making friends. What if every week, you had awesome events like Anthropic's AI hackathon, it's hard to imagine being lonely? The problem is many awesome events like Anthropic's AI hackathon aren't posted on event aggregators (meetup , eventbrite). So it's a trade-off. Either spend 3 hours searching and curating events each week or don't be social. It's not just us though, loneliness is epidemic. In fact, London was rated the "loneliest city in the world".

What it does

A user specifies event topics (e.g. AI hackathon, dungeon & dragons)
We search the entire web for events around this topic
We surface those events to you
You respond w/ "y/n" on chat and we handle all the logistics

How we built it

Twilio for chat-interface
LLMs to scrape the web and find events and clean all event-pages from unstructured to structured data
LLMs to match user w/ preferences

Challenges we ran into

A lot of event pages are out-of-date
A lot event pages are weird messy formats
Most event pages aren't easily found on event aggregators and can be found in a mix of channels (linkedin, instagram, company websites) so you need to aggregate all those channels. No one has done this before.