Barter

Inspiration: Side hustles are common, but selling them for cash is hard. There's no trust, no clear price, and lots of competition. Trading your side hustle for someone else's skips those problems: instead of asking "what's this worth in dollars," you can just ask "is this a fair trade," which is an easier bar to clear. What it does barter is a peer-to-peer marketplace that lets people in New York City trade skills and services directly with each other, no cash required. Instead of hiring a stranger and paying market rate, or trying to sell your own side hustle to strangers who don't know or trust you yet, you exchange value directly: a haircut for a logo design, tutoring for tax help, a home-cooked meal for furniture assembly.

How we built it: Grounding the idea in something real. We didn't just build "an app," we built something targeted at a real NYC problem: skilled people with side hustles who struggle to monetize them, and a dense city where in-person trade is actually feasible. Challenges we ran into While in the middle of our project, we realized that the scope of our project was too big for the time constraints. We needed to minimize our scope in order to test and complete our project. 

Accomplishments that we're proud of: While in the middle of our project, we realized that the scope of our project was too big for the time constraints. We needed to minimize our scope in order to test and complete our project. What we learned Trust is harder to design for than matching — we initially thought the hard problem was "connect people who want to trade." It turned out the harder problem is "make two strangers comfortable enough to actually do the trade" — which pushed us to think seriously about verification, ratings, and dispute handling. What's next for Barter

Adding more features: focusing on accessibility, giving barter more feature: edit, cancel listing instead of manually doing it on the website