Inspiration

On the fateful day of June 12, 2025, Sabih talked with the Public Works Director of the City of Evans, Colorado. It is a small city with a population of just 20k, and his role was to oversee the roads, water lines, utility poles, etc.

In that call, Mr.Bereskie explained the various problems his department had with the current asset management software they used. When Sabih first asked him about their tech stack, the first words out of the director's mouth was "this is a sore point". He mentioned missing features that they had to creatively work around. He also gave an example of not knowing they ran out of inventory for an item that construction companies needed to get water from fire hydrants for construction sites.

He also mentioned that the smaller companies in this space were getting bought out by larger ones, and then jacking up the prices.

That's when I realized that this space needs some startup love - high quality solutions at an affordable price.

Demo login:

City staff: janedoe@gmail.com janedoe123

Field staff: johndoe@gmail.com johndoe123

What it does

Cityflow fills this gap by creating an all-in-one solution that cities can use to manage their assets and infrastructure. It covers the full loop, from customers submitting complaints, to city staff reviewing and triaging them, to field teams going out in the field, logging their fixes, and emailing the customer who made the complaint in the first place.

How we built it

AI coding: Bolt
Frontend & backend framework: Next.js (react)
Database: Supabase
ORM: Drizzle
Auth: Better-auth
Styling: Tailwind + shadcn

And a little love from windsurf ;)

Challenges we ran into

Creating a MVP list of features that still provided sensible functionality was a tough balance. Me and Yohance first started the project by listing down what features we wanted, separating them into MVP and post-MVP, and then finalizing the list of features to create. This allowed development to go on smoothly, without having to make product decisions halfway through. We barely had time to make the MVP features.

Setting up authentication with better auth was a bit tricky due to library issues with drizzle. But we sorted it out.

Setting up deployment was a bit of a challenge with the classic CORS issues.