BarterBuddies

Our Inspiration, what it does, and how we built it

We wanted to work on something that challenged the engineering of today’s consumer economy. As college students across different campuses we noticed the common trend of waste, hoarding, and overspending among students. At the core of this issue is a first-instinct to buy a solution, whether service or product, when a problem arises. We did some market research among fellow hackers and on our college's subreddits – finding that students have no choice but to pay for items/services or go without them. To solve this we wanted to introduce a platform to allow students an alternative way to pay for items, allowing students to leverage the typically illiquid assets that they already have.

Challenges we ran into

We wanted to keep development light, so we chose to use React and Convex to abstract away many of the details associated with full stack development. Still, however, among our biggest challenges was getting everyone up to par in terms of technical ability. We are students from all sorts of backgrounds (from cognitive science to business to CS majors!) and who all had varying levels of experience with development.

Accomplishments that we're proud of and what we learned.

That’s why, as we finished up the final steps of the Hackathon, we felt so proud of being able to power through and produce a functional product of our vision. All of us grew and learned immensely about software development, converting ideas into tangible visions (using tools such as Figma and Dall-E), and - most importantly - the “hacker” mindset. We all have had so much to take away from this experience.

What's next for BarterBuddies

Our long-term vision for the app is to become the go-to platform for bartering and item trading among young adults. We plan to expand and grow beyond the college student market by developing partnerships with other organizations and by continually iterating on the platform to meet the changing needs of our users.

Built With

• convex
• react