coffeegrindr

Inspiration

We think everyone can empathize with the insecurity of meeting new people. There are a plethora of ways to meet new people online if you are single, but it can be more difficult to find new, platonic relationships for those that are not looking for romance.

We wanted an on-demand friend-finding service that could match us up with another friendly face for a quick chat about life, and that's what we built.

What it does

CoffeeGrindr helps bring people closer emotionally that are already close geographically. Imagine you are visiting a new city and you have free twenty minutes. Rather than spend that twenty minutes looking at your phone, you could use CoffeeGrindr to connect to someone in your area and meet to have a conversation with a new local friend.

How we built it

We used Ruby on Rails to quickly get our API up and running on Heroku. We simultaneously developed our front-end application using Ionic and Angular.

We accomplish our secret sauce of matching individuals in the same area with Elasticsearch. Once we match a pair of people, they are able to chat in real-time with each other using Firebase.

Once the participants decide on a venue they want to meet at then we link to Lyft so they can get a safe and convenient ride to meet their new friend.

Challenges we ran into

We had some trouble getting our app deployed to our smart devices. These issues caused major slow-downs in being able to test, debug, and fix our code.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

The design of our app is gorgeous. We are proud to have gotten a working prototype that's going to help us make new friends wherever we go.

What we learned

We learned we want CoffeeGrindr to exist for our own use.

What's next for CoffeeGrindr

Polish up a few more half-baked features so that it is ready for release to both Android and Apple.

For CoffeeGrindr to be helpful, a critical mass of users is required in any given location. Because of this, we will heavily market our launch to users in only San Francisco. From that point we will grow into other metropolitan areas.

As we are growing our user base we will partner with businesses to offer innovative marketing within CoffeeGrindr. CoffeeGrindr will be able to suggest a local coffee shop to a pair of our users looking for a place to meet.